Hen Chronicles: Sometimes, mischief wears feathers

The excavator

Is it possible that “the girls” pull some of their stunts just to get a rise out of me?

A few days ago, Liz noticed that the hens had dug a sizable hole in their pen. When I went out to check, I found a crater that was about seven inches wide and three inches deep at the southwest corner of the run. The hole was up against, and under, the wooden frame.

Chickens love to dig ditches in sand or loose soil so they can lie down and toss the sand or soil all over themselves, using their feet and wings. This is called a dust bath. The dust, which the chickens later shake off when they get up, discourages parasites from setting up shop in the hens’ feathers.

I certainly don’t want to discourage dust baths, which have the added advantage (for humans) of being very entertaining to watch. But I didn’t like the idea of having a hole at the very edge of the pen either. So I set out to fill it.
 
Pushing down on the soil directly outside the pen, I slide it under the frame and into the hole. As soon as I started doing this, Snow, our Plymouth Rock hen, parked herself in the hole and began scratching — or should I say shoveling? — the newly deposited soil out of the hole. The more dirt I shoved in, the more dirt she shoved out. The faster I worked, the faster Snow worked. Snow seemed to think this was a game, and I suppose it was.

I could see I was getting nowhere, so I propped some bricks outside the pen at that corner, just to make sure nothing could get in or out of the pen if the hens' feats of engineering enlarged the hole enough to undermine the soil outside the pen. That will have to do until I can temporarily relocate the hens, pull the empty pen away from the coop, and level everything out with a rake.

Yesterday, the hens found a new way to aggravate me.

They often overturn their feed bowl or their water bowl. That’s old hat. But this time, they kicked things up a notch.

When I went out to check on them late in the morning, I found that they had somehow managed to knock over the water bowl in such a way that it landed in the feed bowl, which is the same size and shape. The upside-down water bowl covered the right-side-up feed bowl, as if they were two parts of one unit.

The feed bowl was now full of water. It also contained saturated pellets that had the consistency of mush. There was no one else on hand to clean up the mess, so the job fell to me.

The hens watched this process with great interest, as they do with all human activity in their neighborhood unless it involves sudden movements or loud noises. Those scare the dickens out of them, however briefly.

Cats chuck up hairballs and scratch the furniture. Dogs bark at phantoms and destroy curios when they tear through the house. But chicken antics seem to be especially imaginative. That leaves me wondering if they’re just clumsy critters acting on instinct, or downright mischievous creatures who love a good prank. I'm leaning towards the latter.