Hen Chronicles: The therapeutic skills of chickens

I doubt that our hens know, or care, about their therapeutic skills, but that's fine. I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so here it is. Our "girls" put a smile on my face and a spring in my step day after day, simply by doing their job. And late last week, they outdid themselves.

Let me explain.

Before we bought our first hens in April 2012, I never gave a thought to how often chickens lay eggs. But now, almost two years later, I find myself mildly obsessed (if that’s possible) with what is, for hens, Job One. It’s satisfying, plain and simple, to see Snow, Nala, Hope and Nellie laying well.

The past two months or so have not been the best of times in that department. For one thing, hens produce fewer eggs during the winter, because they need a certain amount of daylight to get the apparatus cranked up and shorter days slow the process. When our four hens are running on all cylinders, we typically get three or four eggs a day during the summer, but only one or two eggs a day during the winter, and occasionally none at all.

On top of that, Hope, one of our two Rhode Island Reds, has been molting, and molting hens rarely produce any eggs until their new feathers come in. With Hope temporarily out of commission, we’ve been down to three laying hens for a while now, at a time when their output is off somewhat anyway, because of the season.

So, imagine my surprise when I went out to the coop Friday with a late-morning snack for the girls and found not one, not two, but three eggs resting side by side on a bed of pine shavings in the nest box. The next day, my wife Liz found three more in the same spot, marking the first time in two months that the hens have produced three eggs on two consecutive days. (Hey, I said I was obsessive, and that certainly applies to keeping records.) All of the hens took Sunday off, but three of them bounced back with three more eggs on Monday.

Laying is what hens do, of course. To them, it’s as natural as eating and breathing and clucking. Yet even after retrieving eggs day in and day out for the last 23 months, the sight of a freshly laid egg in the nest box still gives me a boost. The more eggs there are, the more enthusiastic I become.

The world at large may be going to hell in a thousand different ways, but there is a measure of stability to be found in something as pedestrian as the nest box in a chicken coop. Backyard chickens are the pets that just keep on giving. Each egg is a carefully wrapped gift, a fragile reminder of our bounty. The novelty never wears off.