Hen Chronicles: Curious about new stuff, and cautious

If backyard chickens are in your future, here are a few handles to avoid when naming your flock, unless you're big on irony: Magellan, Columbus, Vespucci and Champlain.

Aside from the fact that male names may not be the best choice for hens, there’s another, equally compelling, reason to steer clear of famous explorers when choosing monikers. Although chickens are extremely curious, they also can be very timid and apprehensive about checking out any changes in their surroundings.

The other morning, I poured a 50-pound bag of sand into the outdoor pen that is attached to our coop, before letting Snow and Nala out for the day. I did this partly to prevent the run from becoming muddy during the inevitable sogginess of early spring, but primarily to give “the girls” a place for their dust baths.

“Hens adore few things more than settling down in some dust (or almost any fine material) and vigorously pumping their wings in such a way that it flies up through their feathers,” Robert and Hannah Litt explain in their book, A Chicken in Every Yard. “It is lots of fun to watch; even better, it makes it very difficult for parasites to survive.”

The hens normally race down the ramp from the coop to the pen at dawn, knowing that breakfast awaits. But on this particular morning, they eyed the sand-covered ground in the pen and refused to emerge. Their little heads bobbed in and out, in and out, in the robotic fashion of chickens, but that’s as far as they got for several minutes.

Admittedly, the sand looked a bit like snow in the early-morning light, and if there’s anything the girls don’t like it’s walking in the snow. But even when I shook their food bowl under their beaks, they stayed put in the coop, hovering at the door but venturing no farther.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Snow gingerly walked halfway down the ramp. She stopped dead in her tracks, hopped down to a bare patch of ground under the coop and eased herself toward the food bowl from the back, making sure she got no sand under her dinosaur-like toes. Nala followed suit, and the hens tucked into their breakfast.

As the day wore on, the girls eventually conquered their fear and set foot on the sand. By the time I headed out with their midday snack, they were traipsing around the pen as if the sand had been there all along.

Still, if Columbus had been as trepidatious as these two, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria probably would have missed the tide.