Most mornings, chicken tending is fun, at least for an early riser like me.
This was not one of those mornings.
I knew I was in for a grueling experience when, after walking the dogs in several inches of snow, I cleared the end of the driveway, only to have a city plow with a tremendously long reach rumble by in my moment of victory. After mumbling a few choice words in my preferred language for swearing - French - I grabbed the shovel, started from scratch and eventually drove off to the store to buy the Sunday papers
The Maine Sunday Telegram was on the rack, but The Boston Globe was nowhere to be found. This prompted me to ask the obvious question: is life worth living? But it was almost time to feed the chickens, so I headed home to tackle more mundane concerns.
First, I had to shovel off the deck. Then I had to make a path from the deck to the garage, where I store chicken feed and other supplies for “the girls.” The coop is a good 60 feet or so beyond the garage, so once I had filled the feed bowl, I placed it on the floor next to a jug of water and grabbed the shovel yet again.
Setting out for the coop, I saw that it was completely buried in snow. From a distance, it looked like a large version of a gingerbread house, but that quaint image evaporated once I got back there and went to work clearing the snow from the roof.
Normally when it snows or rains, I place a tarp atop the chicken-wire pen that fronts the coop. But on Saturday it looked like this would be a big storm with lots of snow and a bit of wind. So I pulled out a very large tarp late Saturday afternoon and draped it over the pen, with enough left over to fully cover the east and west sides of the pen as well. I left the south end open, so the girls wouldn’t be completely closed in when they got up in the morning.
It took a while to remove the snow from the tarp-covered pen. While doing so I noticed that the small coop window I keep partially open at night for ventilation was plugged up with snow. So I cleared that off as well, and finally opened the coop door.
There was no sign of the four girls, nor any sound from within. When I lifted the hinged roof to check on the hens, they were all still on the elevated roost, lined up side by side with all of them facing me, like feathered curios neatly arranged on a mantle. They appeared to be half asleep, and did not move, chirp or cluck, but their eyes were open.
With the coop door newly opened and all of the coop’s windows either closed or blocked, the girls probably thought it was midnight until I popped open the roof to peer at them at 7 a.m. or so. But by the time I returned from the garage with food and water moments later, they were wandering around the (still dry) pen, looking for breakfast and probably wondering why the heck their tarp-enclosed run felt unusually claustrophobic.
A couple hours later, I found a warm, freshly laid egg in one of the nest boxes, and another one two hours after that. Life goes on, even during a nasty storm.
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