Attacked From Above

I’m still working on the chicken pen/coop and in the meantime the chicks are getting bigger and will soon have outgrown their small cages I made them for the time being, I lost one a couple weeks ago for a few minutes, one of the black chicks jumped out of the cage while I was moving them from the night cage to the outside cage for the day, OK here I am thinking I have just given one of Cindy’s chicks to the dogs because Buddy Cindy’s Dads Border Collie was sitting at the fence just waiting for the chick which was running around like a chicken with it’s.., well we weren’t there yet but Buddy was close.

I made a dive for the chick which didn’t work because next thing after I had missed my chance to grab it the chick was in little Dixie’s mouth, Dixie is standing there with the chick flopping around in her mouth and I just knew the chick was a goner, I yelled for her to drop it and she obeyed leaving the chick running around again, I picked it up and gave it a look over, there was not as much as a wet feather on this chick, the chick had no injuries what so ever and I see now that my little sidekick Dixie had actually caught it for me and was just holding it had I just come to her and taken it rather than telling her to drop it.

This reminded me of a little bird incident we had back when Dixie was a pup. We planted grass in areas of our front yard and had the areas all roped off to keep unnecessary foot traffic from it, the front of our house was covered with all types of bushes and flowers and they were all growing well, Cindy and I were sitting on the porch and Dixie was milling around in the yard when all of a sudden we hear what sounded like a shrill scream coming from the front of the house, Dixie is nowhere to be seen and the sound is coming from the tall four o clock flowers which were shaking like crazy.

Out from the flowers Dixie comes backing out of quickly with a baby Blue Jay in her mouth and the little bird was letting out the awful scream we had heard, Cindy makes a dive off the porch jumping the ropes and is yelling for Dixie to “Drop It, Drop It, Drop It” which Dixie does and the bird makes a couple hops then turns and attacks Dixie, the fight was on again Dixie has the screaming bird in her mouth and Cindy is yelling “Drop It, Drop It, Drop It” and again when dropped the baby Blue Jay attacks Dixie, this happened about three times and could have gone on for a while at this rate but Cindy grabbed Dixie and now in addition to the screaming baby Blue Jay hopping toward her as she is jumping the ropes coming back toward the porch carrying Dixie, she now has a Momma Blue Jay dive bombing her and in addition to the shrill screech of this bird she was very quick too, Cindy thank goodness was faster she ducked and bobbed each time the bird aimed at her head and made it into the house leaving me sitting laughing on the porch.

 I went in and had to laugh again at our tough little Daschund with her tail curled high above her back looking like an Irish Setters, the hair standing on her back said she was ready for a rematch and she was now scratching at the door for me to let her out, the Momma Blue Jay and the Baby were now across the street but the shrill screech threats were still coming from the Momma, there were no injuries that I could see on any of them including Cindy, we enjoyed the rest of our evening watching Dixie growl with her nose through the fence at the baby Blue Jay across the street sitting on the porch rail screeching back at her, Cindy nor I wanted to walk off the porch to look for Momma but I am sure she was watching from the trees.