Our Weekend Went to the Birds, Thanks to the Boys

My little boys spent all of Friday afternoon in the back yard, exploring and imagining.

Hyrum ran into the kitchen while I was getting dinner started and shouted, "MOMMMM!!! Grab your camera!  We need a picture!"

 We inherited nine chickens last June, and they quickly became part of our family. Although far from expert, we figured out how to take care of them.  One of the kids' favorite activities, especially when friends are over, is to check for eggs.  The boys and Evie had been checking for eggs when they found a wren stuck in the coop.  This happens frequently, but they startled it, and in its attempt to escape, it ran into the chicken wire and stunned itself so it couldn't fly away.

Can you find it?  The boys kept trying to catch it.

Eventually, the little bird came to its senses and flew away from certain entanglement with those crazy boys.

Later that same afternoon, I was sitting at my computer when Micah burst through the back door, excitedly exclaiming, "MOMMMM!!!  Come outside, NOW!"

"Remember how we used to have nine chickens?"

You see, in our ignorance, we had no idea how to protect the chickens from the heat of July and August, and we lost three in one week to the heat.  It was sad to watch them suffer, but we didn't know it was the heat until the third one died, then we actually installed a mister system and they fared much better.  The same week that the three chickens died, a fourth disappeared.  We have a HUGE owl that lives in our neighborhood (quite cool when you spot him at night, sitting on the corner of your roof), and I suspected that he had swooped down and taken the hen for his dinner.

Well . . .

. . . apparently, that fourth chicken was not an owl's meal.  The boys and their friends found the remnants of its body entangled in the vines in one of our flower beds.  She was just feathers and bone, beak and claws by this time, but the boys thought it was a great treasure.  Duly impressed, I instructed them to throw the body away and scrub their hands.

I didn't think anything more of the chicken . . .

. . . .until later that night, when Brad walked out to our guesthouse to deliver the mail to my cousin and his wife who live there.  He was back too quickly to have delivered the mail, and he asked me to come outside.  "Why?"

WHAT IS THAT????

Micah and his buddy thought it would be funny to prop up the chicken carcass in front of Tommy's and Taylor's door to scare them when they got home.  Doesn't look that bad, does it?

Let's get a little closer, and then you can decide.

 Would that startle you on a dark night by your front door?

Micah laughed and laughed, and he was so mad at me when I made him take it down before they got home.

He came back in the house, and I asked him where he had put the chicken.  He sheepishly hung his head, shrugged, then answered, "Now it's on the sidewalk."

I'm so mean.  I made him throw it in the garbage can.

Boys.  What ya gonna do?