...from all of us still alive at Frogknot!

And then there were eleven.

So...we had another attack in the night with the murderer returning to the scene of their first crime...on Easter Sunday too!We lost the three brave hens who were still roosting where the first attack took place, Dou -Mu, Wujimu and Orphea, who we only named yesterday.

The eleven who were roosting in the old pen are all fine.We cannot understand how the attacker got into the pen after all the modifications we made to secure it but it is clear that the culprit is now, most definitely a quoll. All three hens only had head wounds. So while everyone else hopes to be visited by the Easter Bunny we get the Easter Quoll!I feel bad and very sad about it all because I built their death trap. I stood and watched the three of them climb in yesterday at sunset before securing the hail net over the entrance and fastening them in for the night.We will have to keep the rest in the old pen but still let them range freely during the day. There was a quoll attack years ago in the old pen but the culprit of that attack never returned. I hope that this attacker does not find them there. It would seem nowhere is impenetrable.Quolls numbers have declined drastically over the years since European colonisation and so in a weird way there is a slightly positive side to all this.

Undercliffe Falls.

So... Ros is with us for the Easter weekend and today we went to see Undercliffe Falls which are near Liston in New South Wales and about a 45 minute drive from Frogknot.We were not expecting the steep climb down and once down dreaded the climb back up!

All present and correct.

So...all the remaining hens after the attack the other night are still safe and with us. If the culprit returned last night they could not get at the hens. Tonight the three who braved last night at the scene of the crime have returned there to roost and the other eleven have chosen the old pen again, including tonight Yudhisthira who spent last night on his own with Roxy.

Murder mystery.

So...sometime during last night something got into the 'chook' pen and attacked the hens. We heard no commotion at all.This morning Will discovered 'Freak' lying outside the pen missing it's head and the lid over the nesting boxes was hanging off.I took this picture of 'Freak' yesterday to show how much they had grown.Inside the 'chook' pen Will found Quilla dead with a nasty head wound and Long-Mu is missing. Hecate has been attacked and has been in shock all day but does not appear to have any major wounds. Odin also has a small wound on his head but everyone else seems untouched.We don't know if it was a quoll or a fox.We saw a fox the other day, just over the hill,  by 'Foxwater'. It looked like the young one that we saw a while ago down on Garth Lane one night.When quolls attack they do only eat the chicken's heads though and the fact that 'Freak' was missing it's head and Quilla's head was a mess suggests it was a quoll.

A spotted tailed quoll.

Long - Mu has vanished though, like Isis did a few weeks ago. We did find some of Long - Mu's feathers but that's it. Will says a quoll would take a hen away but it is more likely that a fox would do that. Dave next door says that he has never seen quolls up here but Will said he has seen a quoll here when he lived here before and his hens were attacked in the old pen.

We have fixed the nesting box lid and I have been round the entire pen and secured any small gaps that there were. I have raised the entrance ladder by a foot and as an extra precaution have closed the whole thing off with another piece of netting. I doubt anything will get in tonight should the culprit return to the scene of the crime.

The rest of the hens have been wandering around as normal and seemed largely unaffected until it came to sunset when they were all very reluctant to go back into the new pen.

As it stands tonight only three were brave enough to return to roost in the new pen where the attack happened. Ten of them are roosting in the old pen which just goes to show that they are not as daft as they seem if they remember that it is still there and Yudhisthira is roosting in Roxy's shed.

After my modifications I doubt anything will get into the new pen tonight.

We buried Freak and Quilla tonight in the moonlight. It is all very sad and unsettling.

Pictures from the Crime Scene...

Rest in peace Freak, Quilla, Long - Mu and Isis.