Our dogs - Chocolate Lab Aquinnah and Pit Bull mix Martha - were pretty excited when they stepped outside Tuesday morning and into the first snowfall of the season.
Not so the chickens.
Normally, “the girls” are awake when I open the coop door at dawn. Sometimes they’re even jumping around at the coop’s windows as I approach, eager to get into the pen because they know bowls of chow and water await them there.
Tuesday morning was different. A light snow had been falling for an hour, so the ramp leading down from the coop, and the ground in the pen, were decked out in white. To the human eye, it made the pen look fresh and new, but to the chicken eye, it signified change, which is never a good thing.
The hens stayed on their roost when I put their food and water bowls into the pen. They didn’t even get up when I noisily unfolded a frozen tarp and placed it atop the pen, to prevent more snow from accumulating there.
By the time I opened the coop’s door, Snow, our Plymouth Rock, had hopped down from the roost to the floor of the coop. But she showed no interest in going outside, and the other three hens didn't even come down from the roost.
I tried coaxing them out by shaking their food bowl near the open door, but to no avail, so I headed back to the house. A half hour later, the chickens had yet to emerge from the coop, so I decided to let them be.
They did come out eventually, after trying to get down without stepping into the snow, which, of course, was impossible. But it wasn’t until an hour or more after I unlatched the coop door and placed food and water in the pen.
There might have been several explanations for this behavior, but I narrowed it down to one through a process of elimination. The hens were not sick; by late morning, they were strutting around the pen, eating voraciously and demanding snacks. They were not deterred by the temperature, because it was a relatively balmy 30 degrees here in Augusta, Maine, at dawn on Tuesday. The day before, when it was only 15 degrees out, the hens came running down into the pen as soon as I opened the door.
That left one explanation: the snow. Hope and Nellie, our relatively young Rhode Island Reds, probably had never seen snow before, so I had to cut them some slack. But Snow and Nala, our Barred Rock, arrived on the scene as adult hens in April 2012, so they had plenty of experience with the white stuff last winter.
I don’t think it’s the snow itself that bothers them as much as the newness of it. Even Snow and Nala, our veterans, had not seen snow for several months when a coating of it greeted them on Tuesday morning. So they had to adjust.
All of which might suggest that chickens, burdened as they are by the stereotype of birds as dim-witted animals, are too dumb to remember something they encountered only last winter. But they certainly aren’t the only species with that defect. Here in New England, the first snowfall always triggers plenty of fender benders as reckless, speeding motorists who’ve driven in snow all of their lives act as if they, too, have never seen this mystery substance.
No comments:
Post a Comment