I don’t know if our hens spent much time outside last winter, because we bought them in April. But after we had our first snowfall of the season Wednesday night, they seemed to be both perplexed and angry.
I had to scrape about two inches of the white stuff off the roof of the coop and clear off the tarp-and-plywood covering atop the pen first thing Thursday morning, when below-freezing temps and a very stiff wind made the process especially unpleasant. By then, the snow had turned to rain, adding to the gloom.
When I finally got around to opening the door that leads from the coop to the pen, the girls did not burst forth with their usual zany enthusiasm. Instead, they peeked out of the coop and tentatively set foot on the ramp, as if they weren’t at all sure that leaving their snug overnight lodgings was such a good idea.
A few minutes later, I propped open the roof of the coop to scoop out the previous night’s poop deposits. Nala, our normally sedate Barred Rock, sauntered into the coop from the pen and began squawking loudly while cocking her head and peering up at me as I cleaned the bedding.
Nala may have been telling me to get the hell out so she could lay an egg. But I think it’s more likely that she was using profanity-laden chicken lingo to express the same reaction to the weather that I had when I first got up yesterday morning and pulled the curtain aside to see Mother Nature’s idea of an early November joke.
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