[birding] Re: Chicken evades cougar

[Joel Geier]

P.S. I think this incident might explain the strange sounds that I
mentioned a few days ago, along with the Swainson's Thrush report. Our
neighbors also mentioned hearing an odd crashing sound back in the brush
behind their horse barn yesterday, which they thought might have been a
cougar taking down a deer.

On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 18:31 -0700, Joel Geier wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> Don't know how she did it, but one of our hens just came back from the
> dead. 
> 
> A bit earlier today I found a pullet that this hen had hatched out, on
> its own for the first time ever. Then we saw feathers and some tracks of
> a COUGAR that must have come over an electric fence into our neighbors'
> horse exercise area, where the hen and pullet had been hanging out. 
> 
> Around the same time [as this must have happened], our sheep came 
> barreling from the back yard around
> to the front, just after Becky had seen them heading to the back yard
> and I went out to chase them away from our garden.
> 
> Now the hen just reappeared on her own and seems OK, though missing a
> few feathers off the back. I'm guessing that the cougar nearly nabbed
> the hen but missed when I came out of the house to chase the sheep
> (though I didn't see it), or else maybe it got zapped by the fence and
> that spooked it. One track where the cougar landed in the sand had the
> claws extended (right by the feathers) and is sort of smeared sideways
> as if the cougar was sliding, while the rest had the claws pulled in.
> 
> So, score one for the ever-wily Buff Orpington hen. Her name is Buffy,
> so if any of you were fans of that series, you might enjoy the
> back-from-the-dead idea. We really did think that she was a goner --
> what chance does a chicken stand against a cougar?
> 
> Just to mention an actual wild bird in all of this, a GOLDEN-CROWNED
> SPARROW was giving alarm notes the whole time we were out there.
> 
> Happy birding,
> Joel
> 
> --
> Joel Geier
> Camp Adair area north of Corvallis