one of our chickens is missing

We are down one hen.  We let them out for a run at six.  The Systems Administrator was busy in the front garden working on the railway, and I was weeding and planting down by the entrance.  We heard nothing, saw nothing untoward, but as the evening drew on, and the chickens came home to roost as chickens do, there were only four.  The grand old lady Maran was there, and the speckeldy with the funny neck, but one of the others was missing.

I could see the Systems Administrator looking at the hen house, and guessed that all was not well. Hens are quite hard to count, when they keep running about and going in and out of the house and the run, but after a few years you develop a sense for when you are one short.  We counted the number roosting, and opened the door of the house and looked inside in case there was one down on the floor or in the egg box, and checked along the length of the run, but in our hearts we knew there was one missing.

We shut the remaining four in, and walked around the garden, looking for an errant hen, one that had forgotten the time, or more realistically for a few feathers to mark the spot where the fox had struck.  Nothing.  The other hens didn't look in the least upset or as if they'd had a narrow escape. But we'd lost one.

My immediate assumption was that it was a fox.  A couple of the hens were especially keen on charging down to the bottom of the garden, and I imagined that while we thought that while she was with the others fussing around in the hedge, she'd gone walkabout and met a sticky end.  That is the most likely reason for her disappearance.  But perhaps she just died under a bush.  We've had two drop dead in front of our eyes over the years, presumably from heart attacks.  Or massive strokes.  We tried to work out when we got the speckeldies, and how old they must be, but couldn't remember.  The SA thought they were at least four or five, which is beginning to be a respectable age for a chicken.  At any rate it's remarkable we've been letting them free range part time for that long without losing one before.

I found an abnormally pale shelled egg the other day.  When hens that normally lay brown eggs produce pale ones it's a sign that all is not well.  Before that one was laying unnaturally soft shelled eggs.  None of them looked poorly, but if the supply of dodgy eggs stops we might assume that the hen was dodgy too.  And if, in the weeks or months ahead, I find a carcass of dark grey feathers under a bush when I'm weeding and pruning, we'll know it was natural causes.  Though if I don't we won't know that a scavenger didn't come and collect the remains in the night.

Poor hen.  It was probably a fox, and I feel a slightly negligent owner who should have tracked their movements more closely and followed on down to the back garden if that's where one went. We probably won't let them out for a few days now, and will then keep a closer eye on them for a while, and then if nothing happens over the next weeks and months slide back into the more relaxed attitude we'd developed by the time of this evening's loss.  Such is human nature.