Bedlam Farm Gossip

Gossip…”At its root, the word means god-sibling and once signified any person, man or woman, connected by baptism rather than blood: a close friend someone with whom you’d happily trade secrets. ”  Alexandra Schwartz  Just Between Us

“What’s going on out there?” Jon will ask me when I come in from feeding the animals in the morning.

I always have a story of some kind.  Even if it’s just surprising weather or that some laid an egg.

So this morning, as I told  Jon about Zip and the hens, he got the idea for Bedlam Farm Gossip.  I liked it, shared some of my photos from this morning with him,  and he wrote about it on his blog.

So here’s the gossip from Bedlam Farm today….

Our hens Kitty and Anne are so inseparable I call them collectively KittyAnne, because I can’t tell them apart.

But this morning, as mucked out the barn, I saw  Kitty (I’ll call her Kitty for the sake of the story) walk right past me and down the hill towards the marsh.  The unusual thing was that she was alone.

So when I was done in the barn I went looking for Anne.

As I headed back to the barnyard gate,  there was Anne walking in circles, looking around  as if she were lost.

As I watched her, from the corner of my eye, I saw one of Zip’s legs slowly reach out from under the turned over wheelbarrow, where he loves to hide.  Next his head popped out.

In a flash,  he sprang from under the wheelbarrow and ran after Anne.  She squawked, flapped her wings and ducked under the fence into the backyard.

Now I understood why Kitty was wandering in the pasture by herself.  I’m sure it was Zip who got between the two hens and Kitty ran in one direction and Anne in another.

Now that the snow is gone and the hens are wandering again, Zip is practicing his hunting skills by chasing them.  He never gets too close and as soon as they stop running he loses interest.  But it’s as if the hens have to get used to Zip and his ways all over again.

It was a couple of hours later that Kitty came back from her lone wanderings in the pasture.  Anne never did join her out there.

But this afternoon, when I went to feed the animals both hens were back in the yard.  Anne was in the roost laying an egg and Kitty brazenly ran up to me demanding a handful of meal worms.