Last night around quarter to eight as I pulled up into my driveway I noticed what appeared to be a dead animal on the concrete tiles in my front yard. Upon closer inspection I could see that it was a bird, and a large one, yet I didn’t know what kind. Only when I went inside and looked at it from a different angle through my kitchen window did I conclude that it was a chicken. It was difficult to identify since its head had been removed. There was a bloody area where a neck would have been.
How did a dead chicken end up in my front yard? It was fully feathered, so it wasn’t as if someone’s groceries had fallen onto my property. If a predator hunted or dropped it, wouldn’t those things occur at night? I know some people keep live chickens in their yards, yet no one around here.
I wondered how I would dispose of it. I could shovel it up but then where would I put it? No way was it going into my personal municipal garbage bin, to decompose and smell up my garage until the next pickup. I figured I would take it to the nearest public garbage can which is adjacent to a nearby bus stop. Yet I didn’t want to do this right away as I had just come back from the Y and I wanted to make dinner (the fresh chicken corpse notwithstanding), and besides, game three of the playoffs was already underway between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Tampa Bay Lightning. I decided to let Mother Nature run her course this evening and leave the chicken where it was, as perhaps a predator would take it away overnight.
Since finding decapitated chickens on one’s doorstep is not an everyday occurrence I had a weird sense of foreboding. Was someone giving me a signal? Was I cursed and would something happen to me or my house overnight? I didn’t take that theory seriously but the sight of that chicken certainly spooked me out for the rest of the day. I had plenty of opportunity to take pictures before it got dark but I honestly didn’t want the evidence of that discovery haunting my blog forever.
This morning I took tentative steps to my kitchen window and peered outside to see that the chicken had disappeared overnight. Some creature disposed of it for me. I half worried that there would be a mess of bloody flesh and feathers all over my front yard when I got up this morning, but a predator would more likely take the dead bird and devour it elsewhere. I have not been outside to take a look at my roof yet; there’s always the possibility my roof has been re-shingled with chicken feathers.
One Response
If you ignore something long enough it just might disappear on its own 🤣