There is at last good news to report on the poultry front. In the past, when I have mentioned my chickens or my ducks, it has usually been after some grisly tragedy — a duck decapitated by a terrier, another disembowelled by a fox. I can no longer remember how many chickens I have lost to foxes, which usually leave only piles of feathers as evidence of their visits (though I once saw a fox brazenly killing a chicken in broad daylight just outside my front door).