Our hen outfoxed the fox – and us

As of mid-July, we had six laying hens and a couple of roosters. I was thinking how I missed the energy and movement of a larger flock around the place as Charlie and I pulled into the barn drive the other day with a wagonload of newly baled hay – some of the first we'd been able to harvest this abnormally wet season.

Even over the noise of the Farmall tractor we heard the urgent rhythmic cheep of a newborn chick. One of our remaining hens had gone "broody" over incubating eggs a few weeks back. Though we never spotted her nest, we knew she was setting on them somewhere.

This vocal bit of yellow fluff offered a cheering birth announcement, but it hopped about in the center of a hay stall all alone, apparently without a friend in the world. Charlie switched off the tractor, and we strained for the complementary noise of other newborns, for the low, calming cluck of the hen answering and directing this wayward hatchling back to her breast. Surely she must be nearby – unless the fox had fallen upon the scene.

The wind was picking up and rain threatened, but we delayed unloading the hay to make a rapid search of the barn, peering into its nooks and crannies, bending low to scan the soft, well-scratched dirt and chaff under the hayracks, and stretching to check the post-and-beam construction of the ceiling, where there were plenty of barn-swallow nests, but no sign of a hen and chicks.

I probed Cynthia's stall. She's our nanny goat who has shared her space with broody hens in the past. But we came up blank again and again. Cynthia and the draft horses watched our quest with a lively but maddeningly self-contained interest. I'm sure they knew exactly where that nest was; our animals keep uncanny track of one another. But they weren't talking, just watching, content with the unexpected entertainment we were providing.

Then it struck me: The chick had been stretching its tiny vocal chords to their limit right under the trapdoor to the loft, which was wide open. I climbed the ladder and the sound filled my ears like music – seven more active, cheeping hatchlings and the soft clucking of the hen trying – as quietly as possible – to keep track of them all.

We delayed the unloading a bit longer to reunite the fallen chick with its family and barricade them in the still-empty half of the loft, well away from the opening in its floor. With regular deliveries of water and grain, it will be a superb nursery, airy and dimly lit, inaccessible to foxes, dogs, and rain, which poured in earnest after the last bale rode up the motorized elevator.

We're finally on our way to filling half the loft with the feed to winter over our horses and retired dairy cows. And one wise and wily hen is more than welcome to the other half in which to raise her brood: may she be as successful as that fox, and may most of them be hens.

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