At dawn on Saturday, Snow, Nellie and Hope trooped out of the coop and into the pen for breakfast. Although I had covered the pen with a tarp, “the girls” were far from oblivious to the wintry weather, and with good reason.
It was 25 degrees outside, which isn’t horribly chilly by chicken standards, but cold enough nonetheless. At least two inches of snow had fallen overnight. The sky was spitting sleet. The local police department had posted on its Facebook page that drivers should be very cautious because of slick roads. And the TV weather gurus were blathering on about what they like to call a “wintry mix.”
The forecast called for rain, freezing rain, and sleet before 1 p.m., followed by rain between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m., then rain, possibly mixed with sleet, after 5 p.m. (For some reason, all that the talk of rain followed by rain followed by more rain reminded me of the Monty Python bit about the café whose menu included Spam, Spam, Spam, egg and Spam.) The chance of precipitation for the day was 100 percent.
If life's a bowl of cherries, Saturday was shaping up as the exception that proves the rule.
Having finished their breakfast, the hens marched back into the coop, hopped up onto the roost, and went back to bed. It was a perfectly sensible response to the gray, wet, chilly gloom that had greeted them outside. In fact, humans would praise one another for having the good sense to do precisely the same thing on such a dismal Saturday morning. Why, then, is a “birdbrain” defined as someone who’s a few bricks shy of a load?
No comments:
Post a Comment