Chicken alarm call

This morning at about fifteen minutes before my usual time to get up and go out to the chickens we heard them making a terrible din. We both leapt out of bed and ran up the garden to them, thinking they were being attacked. Bluebell was stood up on the big perch, shouting her head off. I had never heard her so loud before. The other three were beneath the perch. I went in and calmed them down and had a good look round. They all seemed okay and nothing seemed out of place. Bluebells tail looked a bit strange and I was worried something had had a go at her. We searched for gaps in the enclosure and there was no where anything could get in.

We then searched the outside of the enclosure. Then we found the cause of the hysteria. We had put a net over the ground of the veg plot where the veg had been harvested because if any soil is exposed the neighbourhood cats use it as a toilet. This has been a long standing problem in our garden. A hedgehog had got entangled in the net. It had pulled the entire net away and made a hole beneath itself the size of chickens a dust bath. I read yesterday about someone rescuing a hedgehog after her dogs alerted her to something and she said it was squealing and screaming. I can only imagine the noise the poor hedgehog was making, which would have caused the chickens to think it was being attacked.

I ran indoors and got the scissors and while my husband held it, I snipped at the netting. Once we had got a lot of it off, the hedgehog rolled up tightly and we couldn’t get to the remaining bit of net wrapped round it’s foot. We decided to put it in the dog crate with a dish of food and water and leave it to calm down so that we could have another go when it uncurled.

I continued with my chicken cleaning chores and soon after heard the hedgehog walking about in the crate. It was desperately trying to get out. My husband put on gardening gloves and held it while I snipped the last bit of net from it’s legs. It curled back up again and we set it down in the garden with the dish of food.

When we returned about half an hour later there was no sign of the hedgehog, so we hope it was okay after it’s ordeal. We felt guilty about the net and will pin it down more carefully in future but this was the first time we have ever seen a hedgehog in this garden.

The chickens alarm call certainly works and may have saved the hedgehogs life by alerting us to it’s plight straight away.

All the chickens have been losing feathers in a partial baby moult, so I think Bluebells loose tail feathers must be just a part of this. I decided to photograph her tail and try to get portraits of all the girls. They hang so close that it’s tricky to get separate photos of them. While taking these portraits, I realised that Treacle has also lost some of her tail feathers. It’s shorter than it was and I am picking up feathers every day.