Eggs (week ending 5/19): 38The chicks continue to grow - especially the meat birds, which is what they were bred to do, of course. I lost another Barred Rock chick, but this wasn't a suicide. One of those things that happens, I guess. I don't know if TSC puts any guarantee on chicks like McMurray does (or some of the stores I used to get tropical fish from), but whatever the case, I'm sure it's out of the "warranty" period by now. The fish I bought seemed to know what that period was, and would die the day after. But I digress.
Eggs (year to date): 477
Meantime, something rather bizarre happened this morning. I found a cat's tail in the tack room. No, it wasn't the plant that grows along marshes. It was the tail of a cat and nothing else. When I went in the room this morning, I thought there was something there. I got closer and thought that maybe it was a trick of the light. A little closer, and it looked like the matted fur of something dead. So I picked it up and it turned out to be the tail of what looked like a cat.
Now the paranoid in me would say that there was another cat I didn't know about, and that something did it in and left this behind because, like the neck of a chicken, it's not good for a whole lot (and I don't see a predator boiling this up to make stock... ugh, sorry).
But a swipe with Occam's Razor ("the simplest explanation is the most likely") tells me that this might be the tail of the recently executed four socks cat. And maybe it - and possibly more - was dragged here by the possum and hidden away as a snack. And I just didn't see it until now because the light wasn't right and I'd been in a hurry to get the chickens taken care of so I could get to work.
Odd things that make me doubt: the tail was longer than Cleo's tail, and the four socks cat was the same size or smaller. And that seems like such an odd thing for a possum to do, and it seems like an awful long way for a mammal to drag. Maybe it was a raccoon.
I'm going to get another tin of cat food and set the trap again. Just in case. Just to see what happens.
