Hen Chronicles: Keeping chickens isn't a résumé builder

You learn lots of things by owning chickens. That’s the upside. The downside? Most of it is stuff that is of no use whatsoever in any other context.

Take dealing with chicken wire, for example. Our wood-framed pen is covered in the stuff, and I noticed recently that the wire had become loose on the front of the pen. It wasn't detached  — just slack. The wire had stretched. It wasn’t taut anymore.

What to do? The wire is stapled to the front of the pen in such a way that I’d have to disassemble part of the pen to remove and reattach it. That’s not an attractive prospect. But I found an easier solution. Using needle-nose pliers, I gave a piece of wire a slight turn, which tightened it. By doing this over and over again more than a dozen times across the front of the pen, the whole enclosure ended up nice and snug. No muss, no fuss.

That’s not exactly a skill that would look great on a résumé, but it scored high on the chicken entertainment scale. Snow, Nellie and Hope all lined up, side by side, at the front of the pen and watched in rapt attention as I tackled the job, as if they were supervising my progress.

All three of the normally talkative hens were quiet for a change. Perhaps they were confused -- or intrigued -- by the fact that needle-nose pliers in action vaguely resemble . . . a chicken’s beak!