**My jaw just dropped** YAY BABIES ARE OKAY! I did have one girl who 'ran away'. I was keeping them in the garage at night and in the morning I would transfer them to the run in the morning. One morning I thought I'd let them walk out of the garage into the fence by themselves. To my horror, one did not make it. My heart dropped. Out of 24 baby chicks I got in the spring, only 4 were hens and she was one! I searched and searched. In the afternoon, I walked around the neighborhood yelling "Paris!!!". When it started getting later in the day, I was so scared about nightfall. I started going to my neighbor's houses, knocking on the door, and asking "have you seen a chicken running down the street". At one house, I heard several people LAUGHING SO LOUD. Neighbors were going with me to their backyards to comb the bushes to see if my hen was hiding in them. No luck.
Then dusk came and my heart sank. My beautiful Paris. I had put all the others up in the garage for the night. I came in to cry. I wrote a long post for facebook detailing my loss. With the sun gone, I couldn't quit looking. I took my phone outside and used the flashlight app... still calling her name... and still hearing silence. Finally, I bent down one more time and put the flashlight under the deck. I see the two little twigs sticking straight up. There are many leaves under the deck so I didn't think much about it. I stood up to leave but thought, 'hmm that was odd'. So I bent back down. Two twigs, parallel, sticking straight up. I said "Paris?". This time, I was not screaming her name, it was a quiet inquisitive question asked by an exhausted mom. She instantly screamed back 'BAWWWWWWK BAWK BAWWWK'. She lifted her leg and I counted the five toes. My little mottled houdan. The deck sits so low that her whole body was covered by the wood from the deck. I just laughed and fell over. I kept saying her name and she kept answering. She was about 10 feet away from the run the whole day. She came out and I just held her for an hour.
