Hedgehogs and hens
This evening I was on the deck having a cup of tea with a friend who was staying
I
could hear a chook's distress call, so I grabbed a torch and ran over
to the chook house to find the mother hen who had been nesting on the
ground, in a distressed state, standing by the chook house. That
day I had given her two eggs that had been too late to hatch from
another hen (one due today, the other a week later), and had thought
that she had the chicken with her, but no, so raced over to her nest to
find a rather dazed and battered hedghog tangled in the grass by the
nest, and the chick dead on the ground by the nest! The second
egg still intact.
She had previously been sitting on two fake eggs and two real eggs that had disapperead one night, now I know why
I
killed the hedgehog by stomping on it, and tried to revive the chicken
- check and see if it was really dead as it only had one small puncture
wound on its back, but I guessed its mother's frantic battle with the
heghog hog had resulted in her accidentally standing on it too.
Trying
to coax the mother back to the nest wasnt that easy, so I went back to
the nest to put the chicken back, only to find another, HUGE hedgohog
looking at the other hedghog, so dealt to that one as well, then found
the mother hen about a metre away, I guess she saw it all, she was
sitting silently on the ground there, panting. I picked her up,
she was shivering, and I put her on the nest which she gratefully
returned to, making the usual clucky hen noises as she sat back on the
last egg and her dead chicken
Dad
had given me a ferret trap just this evening, that he had modified
slightly (by enlarging the opening) to allow hedghog entry too as they
play havoc with the blueberry fence netting. I placed that, set,
beside the two dead hedghogs.
The following day dawned with another dead hedgehog in the trap and the last
egg gone from under the hen! :-(
So now its war against the hedgehogs as we have another hen sitting on nine eggs in another nest on the ground....