Hen Chronicles: Separation anxiety . . . the chicken edition

I don’t know why I procrastinated as long as I did. But last weekend, it finally caught up with me. “The girls” were not amused. And neither was I.

Every year, Liz and I pull the pen away from our coop, so I can rake the ground within the pen and level it off. This is part of a larger ritual which involves raising the coop and the pen an inch or more, to compensate for the fact that, in the spring, melting snow and heavy rains cause coop and pen to sink into the ground a bit. If I leave them down there, the wood might rot that much faster.

But first things first. Before we could do any lifting or moving or raking or shoveling or elevating or adjusting, Snow, Nellie and Hope had to be relocated to a backup pen. A bit of coaxing with mealworm was enough to lure Snow and Nellie within reach, and Liz carted them off to their home away from home.

But Hope refused to budge. Tasty treats, sweet talk from Liz, scowls and grumbling from yours truly, all manner of cajoling . . . none of it worked. Hope parked herself in the open area under the coop and refused to come out, no matter what we said or did, even when I threatened to turn her into an entrée. (Don’t worry; I made that last part up.)

I won’t bore you with the step-by-step details of our project. Suffice it to say it took longer than expected, and was more complicated than it should have been, because we had to work around Hope, all the while praying that she would not bolt from under the coop and take off across the yard toward one of three nearby streets.

She didn’t. But that’s not the most interesting part of this little saga. As unhappy as Hope was, things were not going well in the backup pen either. We had placed that pen on a recently harvested garden bed, which was full of weeds and worms and bugs and God knows what else. It was chicken heaven, ripe for scratching and pecking. Or it should have been. Instead, Nellie stood at the front of her temporary home, uttering the chicken equivalent of a plaintive wail.

She wasn’t sick. She just wanted to be with Hope.

If two chickens can be soul mates, Nellie and Hope fit the bill. And why wouldn’t they? As pullets back in 2013, they traveled halfway across the country together in a cardboard box, when a hatchery in the Midwest shipped them to us via USPS. They were too young to have combs or wattles and were still chirping like chicks when I picked them up at the post office here in Augusta, Maine.

These two musketeers have lived together ever since. Nellie and Hope have bonded. They’re buddies. Remove one of them from the mix and the calculus is off. Sure, they missed Snow when she had to be isolated last fall while recovering from a head wound, but not as much as they missed each other last Sunday.

Eventually, the hens were reunited in their old, familiar digs. And once that happened, all was right in their world because their “family” remained intact. Would that our human problems could be solved so easily.

Left to right: Nellie, Hope and Snow at home last summer