Feral Chickens

This summer, the lovely wooded hillside behind our house was transformed into a softball field for the private high school that also receives locals via tuition paid by the district. It's a good school, but very focused on attracting dorm students because that's where the money is. There are a lot of benefits to the town and community - I for one am glad that for at least 9 months of the year our little town (well, it's bigger than Wasilla, AK was when Sarah Barracuda was mayor, but that's another story) is pretty diverse, with students from Asia, Europe, Central America and the Carribean breaking up the homogeneity of the locals. So I guess we can look forward to more diversity, as a new dorm is slated for where the current softball field sits. And the hilly topography of the school's property apparently left them with no options but to decimate the woods and move earth around into a very unnatural looking configuration.

One morning I left for work, and arrived home to find an acre of forest gone - flattened by this amazing (horrible, actually) Terminator-3 looking gizmo. Within days, all the fallen trees were hauled away, and in the ensuing weeks the fairly steep, rolling land was redesigned into an even steeper amphitheatre with a little softball field at the bottom.

Here's what our backyard looked like before the trees were massacred:


And here's how it looks now:

Not the end of the world, but kind of a sad event. The woods were great for the girls to play in - there was a nice trail that the XC team used, which made a scenic shortcut when we walked into town. Last summer there was a skunk family back there - a really beautiful matriarch and maybe 6 babies who would wander onto our lawn and commune with our cats peacefully. I think the school may have exterminated them, as I heard a loud bang one day and never saw the skunks again.

Now to the story that inspired the title of this post...this spring we got six barred rock chicks, which stayed in our basement for a while but eventually moved to a coop on the lawn. When they were big enough, I began letting them free range during the day, and as time passed they became more and more adventurous. Finally they made themselves known to our neighbors on their short walks up the road a bit. One of my neighbors caught my attention one day and asked "do you have chickens?" I thought uh-oh, is there some zoning restriction? But I answered truthfully, and she said "Oh that explains it! All the sudden I noticed chickens and I thought they must have been driven out of the woods when the construction started!" Yep, feral chickens. I kind of wish we'd let that story ride for a while. Here are the beasts (the four that remain), looking all wild and ferocious while lounging on the deck:

I love 'em!