Hen Chronicles: And now for something completely different

Wednesday morning. A few minutes before dawn. I was heading down the path to the chicken coop, armed with feed, water and my trusty poop-pickup pail, when I rounded the corner that leads to the coop.

That’s when I stopped dead in my tracks.

Pepé Le Pew (or his Maine cousin) sat right outside the southeast corner of the pen, no more than 10 feet from where I was standing. I stared at him. He stared at me. Pepé didn’t move a muscle, and neither did I, for a second or two. Then I quietly and slowly reversed direction, heading back the way I had come. Once I was a safe distance from the stinker, I looked back to see what Pepé was up to.

The skunk sauntered down the eastern edge of the pen and the coop, around the back of the coop, and then up the west side of the henhouse, until it was back at the front of the pen. Having made a complete circuit, it finally waddled off to points unknown, presumably its den, as it was getting lighter outside by the minute.

I released and fed “the girls” a few minutes later. Pepé was nowhere to be found, but I wasn’t reassured. Overnight, some critter had dug a small indentation right outside the pen, only a few feet from where I had spotted our “guest.”

So I got to wondering if skunks pose a threat to chickens. Cranking up the computer, I learned that the answer is yes, and no. A skunk probably won’t break through a fence (or the wire enclosing a pen), but it may dig its way in. It’s unlikely to kill a grown chicken, but even so, that does happen from time to time. A skunk will steal eggs, and kill chicks.

So I got down to work. It took quite a while, but by the end of the day I had covered a 12-inch strip of ground all along the perimeter of the pen and the coop with hardware cloth. To hold it in place, and to provide an added layer of security, I placed several rows of bricks on top of the hardware cloth, creating the illusion of a patio fully surrounding the hens’ digs.

I'm not arrogant enough to claim that the henhouse is now 100 percent skunk-proof, but it certainly is more secure than it was when I spotted Pepé. At least our nocturnal "guest" wasn't a fox. If Pepé was the waking equivalent of a bad dream, then le renard would have been a nightmare. There's a reason why Magua, the scheming, murderous villain in James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, was nicknamed Le Renard Subtil. Translation? The Wily Fox.