The Mystery of the Disappearing Chicken

I know, it's been weeks since I've updated, and a lot has happened. First, to catch up on the events:

At the end of September we'd gotten another group of chicks - they might be bantams, as they're three months now and they're still less than half the size of the other chickens. At the beginning of this month we introduced them into the big coop with the other chickens, but they're still not really big enough to socialize with the others. As a consequence, they're mostly staying inside.

In November, a friend who'd gotten two Araucanas at the same time we got the Myras had an incident. One of her chickens was gotten by a racoon and the other one was alone and keening. My friend decided that perhaps her life wasn't cut out for chickens right now and I told her that I'd take her Araucana into our flock. After a brief period of quarantine we put her into the coop with the others and now, it's hard to tell her from the others. She's a Myra just like the other four Myras, and even Cargill had made her part of his harem. She has yet to lay, but that'll come along in its own time.

Meanwhile, the new Alices have evidenced a problem: an Alex in the bunch. Little Alex has a nice comb already, and has been crowing since the precocious age of 8 weeks, but he's still a rank amateur. His crows sound like he's reading them off a cue card - no exclamation point at all to them.

But rooster he is, and as such, we need to move him along if we're going to keep chicken coop harmony. To that end I put an ad in Craigslist to give him away. I got a response and made arrangements with the man to drop Alex off with him today. I had some errands to run in the morning, and when the whole family got back, the Pirate went out to the coop with a box to put Alex into for the trip. When he didn't come back up after a while, I went downstairs to see what was up.

As I came around to the door of the coop, he came out and asked me "Did you already pack him up?"

"No."

"He's not here."

I wasn't worried. The new chickens are small enough that they work themselves in behind the nesting boxes and stay there, huddling out of sight of the larger birds.

"Move the nesting boxes out. He's back there with the Alices."

He went back inside and there were sounds of bumping and scraping.

"No, he's not. He's not in here. Is he out there?"

I looked in the yard and didn't see him out with the other chickens. I went into the coop and the Pirate and I moved the entire nesting box back and looked behind it, kicked around the straw, felt around inside the walls - nothing. We looked all over the run, the hill, down by the creek.

The Pirate could swear he was in the coop this morning when everyone was let out. Peaches says that he was up on the roost last night when she up the chickens up for the night. We counted all the other chickens, but everyone else was present and accounted for.

I have to say, it seems a weird coincidence that the very bird - a scrawny, skinny rooster - that I was set to deliver today is the one that's gone missing. Did he know and he ran away? Was he taken by someone? I just don't know.