Hen Chronicles: They've turned sleeping into an art form

In reading up on chickens, I’ve noticed that the "experts" giving the rest of us advice often offer conflicting recommendations.

Insulate your coop for the winter, if you live in northern climes. Don't bother, as long as your coop is dry and draft-free.

Make sure your chickens have access to drinking water at all times, even in the coop at night. Chickens don’t need water overnight because they’re sleeping.

Give your chickens scratch (a type of feed used as a snack) in the winter to help them bulk up a bit and cope with the cold. Stay away from scratch because it will turn your chickens into fatsoes. And so on.

Sometimes, though, the experts are of one voice, and here's one thing they all agree on. Once chickens settle in for the night, they sleep so soundly that they enter a trance-like state, which is one of the reasons they’re so vulnerable to predators. We haven’t had any problems with predators, thank God, but I did put the “sound sleepers” claim to the test the other day, after we had a snowstorm, and found it to be true.

Here’s what happened.

Having cleared the snow from the driveway, I shoveled my way out to the coop, which is at the back of our lot. It was 6 a.m., only an hour before Snow and Nala normally burst forth from the coop to chow down and tackle another day.

First, I shoveled my way around the pen and the coop, so I’d be able to get to them easily and quickly at 7 a.m. Then, I shoveled the snow off the tarp that covers the pen during stormy weather. I cleared the snow from the lid on the nest box at the back of the coop. After that, I shoveled the coop's metal roof.

Now, you should keep two things in mind, First, our coop is small - four feet by four feet. So the peaked roof and the nest-box lid are only a few inches from the roost where the hens sleep. Second, chickens talk virtually nonstop when they’re awake. So if they had heard the shovel scraping the roof directly over their heads, or the tarp, or the nest-box cover, or the perimeter of the coop, they would have let me know about it.

But they didn’t make a peep.

When I showed up again an hour later, they were squawking impatiently and demanding to be released into the pen, because their breakfast awaited them. The frantic hens sounded for all the world like they’d been up all night, desperately trying to escape for hours on end.

I wasn’t fooled.