Cinnamon, Come Home!

A fox attacked our flock, and now my wife's favorite chicken was missing. What could I do when I couldn't see well enough to help search for her?

- By BARRY SMITH, East Fishkill, New York

It was a bitterly cold Thursday in January. My wife, Emily, and I both work from home, and I was about to join a conference call in my downstairs office when I heard a commotion outside. Scrambling. Squawking. The sound of panicked chickens penetrated the closed windows. Emily ran out to the yard to check on our flock. As I opened one of the windows to hear what was going on, she yelled, “Fox!”

I couldn’t recall a fox ever appearing on our acre-and-a-half property in the middle of the day. Foxes, deer and all kinds of woodland creatures made nightly appearances on our security cameras, but wild animals tended to stay hidden during daylight hours.

I knew I would be of little help to Emily in corralling our chickens, so I hopped on the conference call. I was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic eye disease that runs on my mom’s side. RP causes vision loss and eventually blindness. In our family, it progresses slowly. I'd been able to drive until I was 32. But by now, in my late fifties, I’d lost much of my sight. I used voice-to-text software on my computer. I could tell the difference between light and darkness, but everything was blurry, as if I were looking at the world through frosted glass.

At the end of the call, I went outside. Emily was still in the yard. “Were you able to get the chickens back in the coop?” I asked.

“Most of them,” she said. The fox had snatched up one chicken, but Emily had startled it into dropping the bird. “I was sure Carmella was dead, so I went to gather the others. I figured the fox would run away now that I was in the yard.”

But this turned out to be a bold and persistent predator. The fox ran off, only to circle around our house and attack our flock from a different angle.