Our hen outfoxed the fox – and us

Free-range poultry are easy marks for predators, and our flock of black and yellow laying hens has dwindled despite our best efforts to give them both liberty and life.

We faithfully shut them in their protective coop each evening, and keep a few roosters who jealously guard them by day in the barnyard. The male birds stretch and spread their feathers to appear much larger and bolder when they are threatened or riled; most often by each other, at times by interlopers – the major one being a certain red vixen raising a litter of pups under a neighbor's shed.

Her home, like ours, fringes a small Midwestern city growing by leaps and bounds. Desperate for nourishment in a largely suburban landscape, she took a bead on our farm, one of the few wide-open spaces around. She then began to snatch our hens in broad daylight from under the very beaks of their gloriously strutting bodyguards.

One day we caught her in the act as she crept from the barnyard, low and sinuous, a seemingly spellbound hen cradled in her mouth. We yelled. The fox jumped, and the hen, released from surprise-slackened jaws, came to life and flapped to the shelter of the hayrack in record time. Others were not so fortunate. Over the ensuing weeks the fox made a noticeable dent in the flock.

We never once considered harming this beautiful animal as she provided for herself and her young. Instead, we started keeping our flock locked in their barn coop full time, ignoring their disgruntled clucks at being closed in with mash and water when the barnyard offered much richer fare – fly and other insect larvae, seeds, and whatever else hens scratch up in their unfettered gleanings.

After a week, hoping that the fox had moved on to a sustaining menu of field mice, we let the hens out again to scratch for their meals. When their numbers once again began to dwindle, it was back to the coop, where they were frustrated but safe.

To our chagrin, a few more succumbed to shock one day when our own dogs managed to squirm under a barrier from their barn kennel to the coop in a fit of pique and boredom at being confined during our brief absence from the farm. Hens simply are not made for rough and tumble games with spirited, tongue-lolling canines.

Along with the hens went egg production, and regular customers soon stopped pulling in for the dozen or two that had always been available for sale in the barn refrigerator (its vegetable bin serves as an honor-system cash box). Most of what the remaining hens produced we used ourselves, or put aside for one fellow who needed a single hard-boiled farm egg to begin his day on the right foot. It did not seem too much to ask or to share.

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