The flock is prone to getting themselves into trouble in my small yard and a big thank you to my long suffering neighbors over the state of their bush. Only on a rare occasion has a stray hen wandered into the street, but never the less in tight suburbia it means they only get out of the run and into the yard when one of us is home.
Even so, puttering around the house (read that as: ignoring important chores and work to idly surf the interwebs) causes me to be distracted for long stretches and they can still find a little trouble. A couple of hens will stray from the main flock and be off to who knows where. So, I periodically go out for a physical ‘beak count’.
One day the count went like this:
Chicken, chicken, chicken, rabbit, chicken, …. RABBIT???
Through the spring and summer there has been a rabbit hanging around our flock. I mean right in the midst of the foraging flock, rooster and all. Nobody, not even Coq Au, is ever remotely troubled by the presence of the rabbit right in the thick of foraging space.
Like an ungrounded romantic, my mind immediately anthropomorphized the situation and created a fanciful tale of how the rabbit and the flock were friends, carried on long conversations about the doings of the yard, and was some sort of mix between ‘Watership Down’ and ‘Wind in the Willows’ … or at least Warner Brothers. I smile when I see the rabbit, and she doesn’t seem overly skittish of me, but neither does she come too close. That is okay by me, a wild creature should be wild, lest she become too ‘used to’ people.
I explained the situation to my wife including my fanciful assessment of their relationship and she blithely, but rationally, suggested that the rabbit is there for safety because the rooster will alert everyone if there is a predator overhead.
Of course. The rabbit probably also enjoys a little of the left over treats as well. Nature finds a way, even in the confines of a small back yard where domesticated chickens and (mostly) feral rabbits coexist.
But my fanciful mind still wants to believe that they are the best of friends!
Couldn’t get a good photo of the rabbit amidst the girls, but here the best photo my poor skills with my camera/phone-pocket computing device could muster.
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