One morning as the other chickens wake and start t
Author:unloginuser Time:2025/03/28 Read: 4522One morning as the other chickens wake and start their regular activities, one of them, Lilly, is found dead. Her death was not natural. The door to the coop was closed all night and there is no evidence of anyone or anything breaking in. Who did it?
The dawn painted the sky in hues of apricot and rose, but the cheerful sunrise couldn’t penetrate the gloom settling over Farmer McGregor’s chicken coop. One of the hens, Lilly, lay sprawled amidst the straw, her bright plumage dulled, a single, perfectly placed puncture wound marring her otherwise flawless breast.
Old Bess, the self-proclaimed elder statesman of the coop, clucked nervously. “She’s gone, gone stiff as a board,” she squawked, her voice trembling. “And the door… it was shut tight all night.”
Farmer McGregor, a burly man with a perpetually worried brow, arrived, his face grim. He examined Lilly’s body, his frown deepening. There was no sign of struggle, no broken feathers beyond the precise wound. No tracks in the soft earth outside the coop, no forced entry. It was a clean kill, efficient and chillingly precise.
The chickens, usually a boisterous bunch, were subdued. Suspicion hung heavy in the air, thick as morning mist. There were twelve hens in the coop, each with their own pecking order grievances and hidden rivalries.
Barnaby, a sleek Rhode Island Red known for his sharp wit (or so he believed), immediately pointed a wing at Henrietta, a plump Orpington hen with a reputation for ruthlessness. “Henrietta always resented Lilly’s superior egg-laying skills,” he declared, his voice dripping with self-importance. “She’d been muttering about ‘unfair advantages’ for weeks.”
But Henrietta, usually quick to retort, remained strangely silent, her beady eyes fixed on the ground. This unusual passivity only fueled the suspicion.
Clucky, a nervous hen prone to fits of hysteria, claimed to have seen a shadow flitting near the coop at midnight, but her testimony was as flimsy as a cobweb. Furthermore, her descriptions of the shadow were vague and contradictory.
Farmer McGregor questioned each hen meticulously. He discovered a simmering feud between Beatrice and Penelope over a prime nesting spot. Agnes confessed to a petty argument with Lilly over a particularly juicy worm. But none of the conflicts seemed significant enough to warrant murder. The puncture wound, so precise, suggested a sharp instrument, something far more deliberate than a simple peck.
Then, Farmer McGregor noticed something. A tiny, almost imperceptible scratch on the latch of the coop door. Too small to have been made by a human hand, too precise to be accidental. He examined the scratch under a magnifying glass. He found a single, almost invisible feather embedded within the metal.
He compared the feather to the hens’ plumage. It wasn’t a match for any of them. But it was remarkably similar to a feather he’d seen on the back of a small, surprisingly nimble owl he’d observed hunting field mice near the coop the previous evening.
The killer wasn’t a chicken. It was the owl. A silent, unseen predator that had slipped into the coop, not by force, but through a cleverly manipulated latch. The “murder” wasn’t a crime of passion, but a carefully executed hunt. Lilly was simply another victim in the owl’s nocturnal supper. The mystery, though initially cloaked in feathered intrigue, had a surprisingly feathered resolution.
