Penny's Obituary

 

Penny. If I'd known she was going to die, I would
have made a point of getting a better picture.

It is with great sadness that I have to report that I found Penny dead on the floor of the coop Friday morning. It was a shock. She seemed fine Thursday. That’s how chickens are. Sometimes they just drop over for no apparent reason. Birds in general are wussy that way. I have read that the first symptom you may see that a bird is sick is that it dies.

Penny would have laid blue eggs. Now we have 5 brown-egg layers and only 3 blue-egg layers. I may have to get over arranging the cartons I give away with alternating colors.

Penny was one of the pullets, just five and a half months old. She was so beautiful! Their feathers are lovely when they are young. Why couldn’t it have been ratty old Goldie? Perhaps Penny had trouble laying an egg. Eggs can get stuck, or break inside, or the oviduct can get twisted. Perhaps she ate something that she shouldn’t have, although I can’t imagine how that could have happened. The other chickens seem unaffected, so I am optimistically assuming that it wasn’t something contagious.

We do not suspect fowl play.