Around here, when one of our free-range chickens goes missing it just means one thing...MORE chickens. At first, they act like everything’s normal, until one day you discover a recently missing chicken sitting on 12 eggs. So for the last few days, I've been counting heads and looking for one single, absent, feather-brained bird named Flo.
I named her Flo after the sassy red-headed waitress character in the 1970s-80s tv series "Alice" who always told people who pissed her off to go "Kiss my grits!!!" with that smooth southern drawl of hers. So from my observations of this particular chicken, if she had been a waitress instead of a chicken, she'd be a sassy beehive hairdo, redheaded Flo. Her feathers are what I call a "Flo-like" reddish, rusty color with a big ole red mohawk thingamajigger on her head. (This last sentence demonstrates my true inability to be an actual farmer. Otherwise, I would tell you that Flo is a ----------kind of chicken with a ------ on her head.)
Side note: I hate it when neighbors ask me what kind of chickens I have. I just want to say, "They are fucking chickens!!!!" But that's beside the point.
Let me give you a little background on Ms. Flo. Being one of my more interactive chicks, Flo hangs around with me while I'm gardening or even just sitting on the front lanai in the morning sipping my coffee. She's one of the first of her brood to meet me when I come out to feed them, and she walks alongside me as I ask her questions about her plans for the day. She's always around. So when Flo disappears, something has gone awfully awry.
Flo has demonstrated that she's too good for the nests I've built* for all the other chickens, and she likes to break all the rules, so she's always flying up to the lanai to lay her eggs. Once she's made her flight, she tries to hide so my husband won't shoo her off in the not-so-quiet manner in which he deals with the chickens who have invaded our deck space. For some reason, once she's laid her egg, she always chooses to take the stairs down, making a thump thump thump sound as she descends to all her nesting chickens below.
One day, I walked into my office and was reaching for the checkbook, when all of the sudden I realized Flo was nestled on my desk in hopes of me not noticing. No eye contact, no eye contact. Aside from scaring the crap out of me, and once I got a resting heart rate back, I had to encourage her to head back outside, which required a special chicken herding technique that I'm beginning to develop quite well. A few days later, I noticed all the rags had fallen out of the rag box in the laundry room, and as I attempted to place them back, there was ole Flo sitting in the box. She's really a foul little bird.
So after several days of cutting down foliage and looking around the perimeter of the yard, I have not found Flo. I can only imagine that she's listening to all my efforts in calling her and clucking quietly to herself while she sits on 10 warm, developing eggs.
*The chicken nests I've "built" consist of empty beer case cardboard boxes from Costco full of scrunched up newspaper. Take THAT, Pinterest!
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