And so ends the great Chicken Experiment.
Despite being a rather hip urban environment, Long Beach has some rural aspects such as the City's rules on raising chickens. Depending on the size of your lot, you can have anywhere from 1 to 20 chickens pecking around the joint. My lot falls in the 20-chicken size range, but being a reasonable person I only got 3 chickens. I'm not a farmer, for pete's sake.
The original 3 chickens were named Buffy, Angel and Spike. Yes, I know. Anyway. They lived happily and each laid an egg a day for a year and a half. During that time, Spike got mauled by a dog and lived to tell the tale after a couple months of intensive care. Then one day a little over a year ago, a hawk came and killed Angel. Right before Christmas. Seriously, what kind of crappy Karma must that hawk have for killing an innocent chicken named Angel, of all things? A month or so later, Buffy met the same fate.
Chickens are flock creatures; they don't live alone. And Spike was sad without her pals, so we got her a new friend named Anya. The theme continues. Spike was the friendliest of all the chickens, to the point that she would stand on the window sill of the back porch and holler until someone came out to pet her. Then she would hop up on your shoulder, like a parrot on a pirate and go for a ride. Sometimes she'd hop up on your head. Look, she was a chicken, don't ask me to explain these things.
Anyway. Spike met the hawk on Sunday and it didn't end well for her. Yesterday, Anya went to live with the neighbors who have several chickens and more hiding places from hawks. And so almost exactly three years after it started, the chicken era has ended.
