My Chickens were LOOSE when I got home tonight!! I was lucky....

[surfchicken72]

So I come home tonight after a night of baseball and the bar, and roll in about 11:30...

I take the dogs out, and when I turn the back light on I hear a clucking... naturally it startled me when I saw one of my Barred rocks Perched on the railing of my deck near the house.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT... is she doing there?!!!

I immediately thought the worst. All others dead, she's injured, what the heck got into the cage...... how will I tell my wife... she's out at a friend's house...
So I grab the flashlight...

Right now I'm about 80% done on building their coop, so they're temporarily in a small coop from "critter cages" until I'm done.
Well, apparently my wife moved the little coop (as we do daily, to lessen the impact on the yard) and to do this she removed the side panel so she could get a firm grip and slide the coop to new location.

Whoops. she apparently forgot to put it back on....
So 3 barred rocks were OUT... LOOSE.. in the middle of the night.
Obviously I found the one perched on the deck railing, but had to search for the other 2....

found them nestled together, in of all places.... on my MITRE SAW.. which is out back due to the building of their coop. Thank god.....
Nobody's hurt,..

The 3 RIR hens stayed inside and were all nestled nicely inside the coop.. all fine.

I was expecting a massacre.
Thank God all was well.....

Anyway.... that's the story.. can't believe nothing came along and grabbed them...

Night....

 

[mommyofthree]

Oh that's scary, glad they're alright!! Last week my husband forgot to shut the chicken run AND coop at night (his job!) and I didn't notice until I went to let them out in the morning. We have 11 chickens and 2 ducks and I found ONE chicken running around in my garage!! I looked all over our 3 acres and didn't find any of the others. Since they always stick together and there was only 1 chicken left I thought for sure something had gotten them....then I heard my loud, obnoxious pekin.

They had wandered around the front of the house, through the neighbors yard to the other side of their barn. Luckily they were all there and ok. But DH was in trouble for making me so worried, and I had to chase those suckers through an overgrown field to get them back home.

I still don't know why that one chicken stayed home all by herself...???

 

[Annabella]

It's good to have a story with a happy ending.. instead of what so inevitably happens!!

 

[swordgeek]

Similar thing here a couple months ago. I sent my rather irresponsible 10-year-old outside to "secure the birds" like we had done every night for two years. I looked out the window and made sure the light was out in the coop, and thought nothing more of it. About 3:30 AM, I heard the rooster crowing like crazy. Thought nothing more of it - there was a huge full moon, and it was shining straight into the windows of the coop.

The next morning, my husband looked out the window, and said, "Umm... why are there chickens all over the driveway?"

"WHAT??????"

Apparently, when my daughter "locked up the birds", she opened the sliding glass door that leads from the front of the shed to the coop, which is the back of the shed. She turned out the light. She checked the storm door that leads to the run from the outside world, and made sure it was latched. But... she forgot to slide the slider shut behind her. So the birds were open to whatever wanted to enter the shed. All. Night. Long. She'd sort of forgotten to do a head-count after free-ranging a few times (there were ever only 3 or 4 birds out there - how hard is that?), and had left this door open once or twice before during the daytime. But never at night before. BAD girl.

It was at that moment that I realized two things: Kid #1 can't be trusted to secure the chickens, and the rooster likely saved the lives of his hens. I don't know what may have tried to get in there, but obviously something roused them all, and he got loud and probably nasty. GOOD boy! That was also the moment I decided I would never re-home him.