Last week, we were home, cleaning up from dinner and making strawberry shortcake biscuits, since the kids and I had gone picking earlier that day. It was lateish, after 7:30, and I was going to get the girls in as soon as I popped the biscuits in the oven. The corrugated plastic panels were pushed aside on the top of the pen since I'd sent Dante out with some leftover hardboiled eggs (does that seem somehow cannibalistic to anyone else?) to treat the girls. As I'm spooning out the dough onto the baking sheet, I hear the chicks making a ruckus outside. I look up and my heart lurches -- there, inside the pen, running about chasing my babies, is a big, fat racoon.
You remember this guy, right? From our earlier post on Predator day, when I discovered him sitting in my hanging flower basket during his midnight snack at our birdfeeder. Right. Well, he's obviously a very happy squatter these days, enjoying all our offerings, as well as those we're not at all offering. I started shouting and running outside, Luke joined me, and the kids came out on the deck in time to watch as this bad neighbor made off with one of our Auracanas -- FuzzyUzzy. The older chicks had flown out of the pen and were milling about in the rock garden, pretty freaked out. The poor younger chicks, who'd been trapped in the pen along with this menace, were also hard to catch and bring inside to safety. It was a terrible night for all of us. Goodbye FuzzyUzzy. We'll miss you, and the pretty blue/green eggs you would have laid. Sniff.
FuzzyUzzy May18th-June 20th, 2007
1 comment:
so sad...
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