Hen Chronicles: They won't come out during a blizzard

For the most part this winter, caring for our chickens has been a matter of braving below-freezing temperatures that force me to swap out a frozen water bowl for a fresh one several times a day, with a bit of shoveling thrown in for good measure. An easily manageable routine.

But things got a bit dicier on Saturday, thanks to Nemo.

First, I had to shovel my way through 16 inches of snow at 6 a.m. (we had 2 feet of it by day's end) just to reach the 3-foot drifts that blocked much of the path to the coop at the back end of our lot. The 7-degree temps and 50 mph wind gusts were so fierce that I could only stay outside for about 10 minutes at a time before retreating into the house to take a break.

When I finally burrowed my way to the coop, I found that there was almost as much snow in the attached pen as around it, even though the top of the pen was covered by a tarp. Heavy overnight winds had blown the snow into the pen through the chicken wire along the front and sides. The hens spend their nights in the coop and their days out in the pen (for the most part), so this was a problem.

How to remove the snow from the pen? Most of the interior of the 6-foot-long pen is not easily accessible because the only opening is a narrow hinged piece of wood atop the pen where it abuts the coop. Even if I had wanted to detach the pen and move it away from the coop to clear out the snow before letting “the girls” out, that wasn’t an option because the pen was frozen in place.

Trudging back to the garage, I grabbed a broom and swept off the ramp leading down from the coop to the pen. I then used the broom to push as much snow as I could reach to the end of the pen farthest from the coop, so Snow and Nala could at least walk around a bit near their food and water bowls.

But the girls had a different plan in mind.

When I opened the coop door and said hello to them, they refused to come out into the pen. Snow, the more assertive of the two, stuck her head out, but she got no farther. And Nala refused to do even that.

So for the first time since we bought the hens last April, I locked them in the coop for the day and moved their feed and water bowls in with them. I guess the girls knew what I should have realized all along: the 4-foot-by-4-foot coop may be a bit claustrophobic, but that’s a small price to pay for staying dry and toasty during a blizzard.

When I checked in on the hens periodically during the course of the day by lifting the hinged roof of the coop, they seemed glad to see me but appalled by the wind that blew in through the open roof, which I quickly closed.

And to think that we use the term “birdbrain” as an insult.