We don’t maintain any landscapes on Sunny Slope Drive, so it took a little sleuthing to figure out how Ollie’s collar found its way to a chicken coop 82 miles from its home.  But Ollie might like to know about the trip his collar took since it went missing, so I’ll do my best to piece it together for him.

The noble BioGardener crew recently visited a house on McCullough, owned by a family who mostly maintains the landscape themselves but who enjoys some seasonal help from their favorite landscaping company.  Ollie must have dropped his collar on McCullough during a walk, shortly before our visit.  Most likely, it was accidentally picked up by the BioGardener crew in a rake-full of leaves twigs and weeds, stuffed in a bag, and loaded into the truck.

The bag, with the collar in it, was dropped off at our storage lot in East Austin, where it waited a few days to be hauled to a local brush recycling facility.  Normally, the collar (inside the bag) would have been reloaded into a truck with 100 or so other bags, driven the short trip to the brush recycling facility, been dumped out (completely unnoticed) with the leaves and other organic material it was catching a ride with, and then would have been ground and shredded, piled, watered, and left to rot for 12 months, ground and shredded again, then finally bagged and sold as mulch.  A nice, dust-to-dust sort of life for a collar to live, but not very fun or interesting, and most certainly not the appropriate or deserved destiny for a collar like Ollie’s.

Every once in a while, I’ll randomly select the softest, most uniform bag of leaves and weeds from the heaping piles at our lot, and take it just down the street to my home. The contents of the selected bag are spared the fate of its fellow common brethren, and treated to a second life as scratch for a small flock of bored chickens that live in a humble coop between our house and the neighbor’s fence. Every once in a rarer while, the lottery bag travels all the way to a small cabin in the woods outside of Fredericksburg, where a small flock of country chickens gets to taste the sweet weeds and feel the crunchy leaves of the big city, which represents the only glimpse of urbanity that these chickens will ever experience.

What makes this relevant to Ollie, is that the bag his collar landed in just so happened to be one of the softest and most uniform bags of leaves and weeds that we collected from our landscapes last week. Even more remarkably, the collar landed in a bag that just so happened to be heading to the flock of country chickens that live in the woods just outside of Fredericksburg. So when I ripped open the bag this weekend and watched the eager country chickens gather as I dumped out its innards, I paid a little extra attention to ensure no trash or other potentially toxic objects were included. Country chickens don’t know how to properly deal with city trash, and could choke on it. Then I heard the tingle of a bell. And saw a flash of metallic blue and bright orange. And there, among the city weeds and leaves, was Ollie’s collar.

I hope the collar finds Ollie well and raises his standing among his family and his peers; a lost neck piece destined for complete disfigurement and destruction that is saved, then hauled 82 miles, then faced with an even more gruesome death by pecking, saved yet again, and finally returned to its rightful spot around Ollie’s neck should allow the little dog at least some entitlement. Please give him a treat for me.