Winter offers the best reminder that chickens aren’t people. Nor are they akin to dogs or cats or hamsters or other domesticated animals which, if they are fortunate enough to have responsible owners, spend their days indoors.
Not that anyone would mistake a chicken for a human based on appearances. Even a two year old spotting a hen for the first time can see that combs and wattles and beaks and feathers and scrawny legs with big dinosaur-like feet must belong to a species far removed from his own.
But it’s easy to assume chickens react to the cold the way we do, and I think that’s where we go wrong.
It was 2 degrees below zero when I headed out to the coop at dawn to release our four hens - Snow, Nala, Hope and Nellie - from their coop. God only knows what the wind chill was.
On mornings like this, your fingers start to tingle after a few minutes outside, even while wearing heavy gloves. In this weather, a woolen cap - what those of us with Québécois roots call a “tuque” - is a mandatory part of my chicken-tending uniform, which also includes boots, jeans, a chamois shirt, a fleece jacket and a heavy scarf, all topped off with an old, beat up L. L. Bean field coat.
When my wife Liz saw me traipsing around the yard in this getup on a somewhat warmer morning recently (wearing a baseball cap instead of a tuque), she said I looked like a guy in a Chevy Silverado commercial - minus the Silverado. I took it as a compliment, but I didn’t verify that interpretation by asking her about it, just in case I was wrong.
“The girls” spend their nights in a four-foot-by-four-foot coop. As I headed back there this morning to let them out, I wondered how they had fared overnight, and how they would react to the frigid new day, even though last winter I made the same trip for the same purpose to the same coop on days that were colder still.
The hens weren’t up yet when I arrived, but the sound of me shuffling around outside as I placed their food and water bowls in the pen woke them. I heard a soft chirping as I walked around the pen to get to the other side of the coop to unlatch the door.
Nala, who molted recently but is almost fully feathered once again, was the first to emerge, followed almost immediately by the other hens. They headed straight for their feed and the scratch I had scattered in the pen as a snack. As I removed the nights “deposits” from the coop and tidied up outside, the hens strutted as hens do, flapping their wings and watching me when I gathered up my supplies to head back to the garage. After a quick bite, one of the Rhode Island Reds walked back into the coop, probably to lay an egg.
I’m not suggesting that chickens are immune to the cold. The girls were moving a bit more slowly than usual first thing this morning. It was obvious to me, as someone familiar with their ways, that they were not overly pleased by this latest meteorological turn of events.
But they took it all in stride, even though there is no central heating in their lives, no sweaters, jackets, scarves or boots, no warm bed with flannel sheets. Like their cousins on the wilder side of the bird world, the hens accepted the frigid cold as their lot and went about their business without complaint.
Down jackets are filled with feathers for a reason, after all. I’m no expert on chicken biology, but the people who are say the chicken’s system for regulating body temperature is entirely different from ours. Maybe it’s superior as well.
Still, Liz probably will make one concession to the cold when she heads out to the coop with a mid-afternoon snack today. In addition to a handful of kale, which chickens love, and a bit of yogurt, she’s likely to bring the girls another favorite: warm oatmeal.
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