Tribute to Gwyneth

It's so quiet in the hen pen.  Dead quiet.  My perpetually singing Gwyneth had an appointment with a coyote yesterday morning and left only cream and golden feathers behind.  Nothing more.

A very young Gwyneth last November

I cried.


All the other hens were more like chickens, but Gwyneth would come running to be petted and let me pick her up to stroke her.



She hung out with me when I mended the fence, inspecting  my tools, taking notes on my workmanship, and as always checking out my nose hairs.


When I fine tuned the perch arrangement, it required her peck of approval for the drill, the screws, the saw and the wood, and she kept a close eye on me as well.

She was an avid weeder of the garden beds until I confined the hens to their own section of the yard (bright as she was, she could not tell the difference between the weeds and the vegetables).  Cutworms and grubs were no match to her sharp eye and beak.

Glowing with the low winter sun

Gwyneth was the queen of the flock but ruled through her quick wit and vibrance and was always the first to check out anything new in the hen pen.











She was a broody gal, wanting at least four times in her year with us to hatch all those eggs she had laid.  I would take her off the nest several times a day to get food and water.  When her feet touched the ground, she would fly/run like a helicopter, wings wild and cackling all the way from hen house to the far end of the pen then stand and buck-buck-buck-buck-bu GACK letting hours worth of pent up energy burst out all at once.

She was to be the subject of "Chicken Clock" since she without fail alerted us to the exact time of day that she and the other hens were wanting to be released from the coop each morning.

Smart, sassy, good looking, sweet, friendly, five eggs a week, talkative, and funny.  What a gal!