Dense vegetation PSA. RIP Annie

This was Annie. She’s named after little orphan Annie because she was roaming my central Austin neighborhood for a few days with multiple sightings across a few blocks in our neighborhood group. One day she passed by our house, and we added her to our flock after failing to find her owner. She was a wonderful, friendly as can be chicken, and an extremely reliable layer.

Today she didn’t come for treats when I put them up, and my heart sank. She is always the first to come running at the sound of the door. I found her in a dense patch of wild common sunflowers with a thin stem of one wrapped tightly around her body, with her neck cleanly broken in two, and a few thin stems pulled to the ground in the vicinity. No signs whatsoever of predation, her body was 100% intact just with a severed neck.

I’ve since learned that dense vegetation can be a risk to chickens, because if they get stuck, they can flail about hard enough to break their necks. I’m certain this is what happened to poor Annie. Tomorrow I’ll be thinning out all the thin stemmed sunflowers so this cannot happen again. The girls love hanging out under those sunflowers, so we’ve been letting a forest of them grow in much of our back yard for years. Never would have thought it could kill one of them. They loved it as apparently there are good bugs underneath, and we liked them being under there, shielded from predators above.

Rest in peace, Annie. I hope your loss prevents others from having the same fate.