Throw a shadow over one of our chickens and they run for cover. That's how you know "the girls" of our flock get around, out in the air, ranging free, as birds are wont to do . They have natural protective instincts, fear-of-hawk twists in their DNA. Chickens that come of age in big commercial poultry sheds have lost that instinct. Friends of ours bought poulets (young teen chix just starting to lay eggs) from a commercial poultry farm. You could walk right up to those chickens with your hugh looming shadow and they'd just fold down. They couldn't forage well either, could not peck down in a hole to grab a fresh bug snack. Their beaks had been clipped because chickens in standing room only sheds peck holes in one another.

Spring brings out our chickens' natural urge to roam in search of fresh worms and the fresh greens emerging from the snow. Sometimes they roam too far, violating dog territory or scratching up a tidy urban perinneal border at a neighbors house. They can be hard to catch. It gets to be a muddy mess this time of year, trying to outrun a four pound, 12 inch tall animal with a pea sized brain and a naturally hyperactive flight/fright instinct. That's where our bird dog comes in, JayJay, the only one of the pack that can be trusted to pin the hen to the ground and not munch on her. If it's getting dark and a chicken has ranged too free, we loose JayJay. The chicken gets a scare but ends up safe for the night in the hen house.

Dusk to dawn, the flock needs a lock down. We have a wide range of chicken predators--barn owls, chicken hawks, gray foxes, racoons. We learned about predator kill patterns with our first flock. Hawks and owls pin the wings of a single bird down and feast on the internal organs, leaving the head and wings and feet around the empty chest cavity, like a bowl. Racoons bite off bird heads and drink the blood.A fox comes and kills one chicken after another in a few frenzied minutes, leaving the yard strewn with broken necked birds. Then the fox goes to and fro, dragging the birds one at a time to some moldering family stash.

We interrupted this fox process one day when we walked a neighbor and her grandson over to visit the flock. Seven birds lay dead though not bloodied. Two were missing, stashed away. The grandson headed blithely for the swing set, but the grandmother was disturbed. I was disturbed too. I had seen the fox once at night , a gray ghost in the darkness, low and flowing along the fence line by the coop. I had taken no precautions. City girl. I didn't know what I was seeing.

We have been here seven years and I am learning the wild side of the city. We are in the middle of Pittsburgh, minutes from the downtown towers. The hillside that rises 600 feet from the river to our fields is steep wooded slide zone, way too steep to build on. Our slope is a small section of an urban forest that stretches along the south shore of the Allegheny River, essentially uninterrupted , though narrowed down to a railroad right-of-way in places. This forest runs from up-country farms and woodlands to the downtown Pittsburgh Amtrak station and the Penquins hockey arena.

It's like a wildlife freeway into Pittsburgh. Deer stroll from birdfeeder to birdfeeder in dense city neighborhoods, wild turkeys block traffic. A few years ago, the city dog catcher caught a black bear a few blocks from here.