Picture a cold as hell day in January. The bare trees creak in the wind, the snow crunches like Styrofoam packing peanuts under your fugly Uggs, friends (all 1,567 of my closest), are FaceBooking temperature readings off their cars...12F, 15F, 2F. I saw it coming so the day before the deep freeze I emptied my girls' coop of all its old litter, and replaced it with a thick blanket of new shavings, clean and dry. I had read that during abominably cold winter days, hen mothers must be sure that the coop is bone-dry, lofty, and impeccably clean so that the girls can languish in all their downy goodness without the threat of warmth-sucking high humidity levels.
That done, I look for a measly egg or two, which have not been forthcoming as of late. So I conduct a quick perusal of the Taj McChicken for possible robbers (and while I'm at it for cheaters and liers, because I was raised Catholic). I see many holes and tunnels, but no trace of their occupants until......AH HA! AHHHHCK IKES WTF!! There, lying in an nesting box, right next to one of Bonnie's beautiful blue eggs is a giant furry RAT! I suck my lips back over my now protruding teeth in abject horror. I'm sure I hear the thrum of Jaws music in the background (instead of my usual tinnitus), and feel my gag reflex...WAIT! (screeching halt) What do we have here? "Templeton's" eyes appear half opened, AND he looks fairly pliable, so I'm not sure if he is dead or alive. I scoop him into the kitchen scrap bowl that I carried to the coop and he doesn't budge. Yep. Dead. Phew! I stood there for a moment, confounded by this discovery....Why? Why did this furry, not so utterly disgusting creature, with rather cute ears and a beautiful soft coat of brown fluff die right there in a hen's nesting box?
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| Poor fatty TempleTON |
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| Kinda dead? and kinda cute |
My possible conclusions:
1. He had never seen a blue egg of such fine stature, so he utterly dropped dead at the sight of it.
2. He was somewhat afflicted with Alzheimer's and completely forgot why he was there, where he was, or where he was headed and simply died of confusion.
3. He had learned to imitate the survival technique used by opossums and was only "playing dead". Then after leaving him for two days on top of our grill cover in single digit temperatures, what appeared to be a stiff state of rigor mortis (this rat was an over achiever by any standards), was really just a frozen solid, slightly live version of his former self.
4. His obese and glutted body finally did him in with a heart attack catalyzed by a high cholesterol count from eating numerous giant snacks of chicken feed and over indulging on eggs.
I'm gonna say the latter.
With all the tunnels and holes under the chicken coop now stuffed with bricks and sticks, AND chicken feeders stored securely in an overnight bin, AND added trips to the henhouse for egg gathering and general spying ons, it appears the seige state is over and TempleTON may have been working as a single agent.
Fingers crossed!
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| Bonnie's blues |
