Chicken-talk

Do you think that animals that cross your path have a message for you? What about animals that are common - like a robin or a hummingbird, or, in our case lately, a flock (or is that a murder?) of ravens?

We've had four ravens - I'm presuming their teenagers who are now out on their own - who keep taunting our chickens that they're going to eat them for dinner?! One of the ravens went so far as to land on the wire covering the chickens pen, cock its head to one side and stare at them.

I kinda wanted to have truly free-range chickens, opening their coop door in the morning and letting them have an entire acre to forage around on all day, hoping that they would (a) only lay eggs in the nestbox of the coop and not all around the yard and (b) that they would be *safe* from predators while unfenced all day.

But after hand-raising 21 chicks from day-olds, we'd put too much energy and time and LOVE into their hand-rearing to let them just fend for themselves on our acre. After all, we live in fairly wild lands: there are racoons around during the day, cougars, black bears, and ravens... not to mention neighbourhood dogs and so on.

So our chickens have a lovely coop, complete with three pens which I rotate them through - I grow an organic wheat/barley grass in two pens while they decimate the third of the luscious greens, then rotate them into the next while I reseed the first. It's a compromise. I'm always considering adding on more pens that I can rotate them through. And two of the the three pens have overhead fencing as well as fencing that's buried a foot down to stop predators from digging under.

The weak point (and I needn't fear that the racoons will read this, because they've already figured it out) is the gate. You can't bury the gate wire a foot down, and there's just a small gap between the gate and the surrounding fencing (I even overlapped some 'soft' mesh to make it look WHOLE but they figured that out, too). Over the past 2 yrs of raising chickens, we've lost about half a dozen to racoons, which is sort of to be expected, I guess.

But none to ravens. I was just wondering about animal totems and what message these raucous ravens have for us, seeing as they return each morning with their loud calling to one another, sending the chickens diving under their coop for safety. They're not likely to get to any of the birds, but their noise is a little unnerving.