I mentioned in this space yesterday that Nellie, one of our Rhode Island Reds, balked at sleeping on the roost with Snow and Hope for three consecutive nights last week, from Wednesday through Friday. Instead, she camped out by herself in the nest box, and stayed there until Liz lifted her up to the roost.
Last night, her stint as a rebel without a cause finally came to an end, thanks to a bit of meddling on my part.
There probably wasn’t an especially compelling reason to persuade Nellie to get up on the roost with the other hens, but I didn’t want to encourage her wayward ways. For one thing, chickens poop a lot during the night, and it’s enough work cleaning out the main part of the coop every morning without adding the nest box to the routine.
More to the point, I had started to wonder if Nellie had suffered an injury that prevented her from hopping up to the roost at night. That didn’t seem to be the case based on her behavior during daylight hours, which has been normal, but the possibility continued to nag at me.
So on Saturday afternoon, I placed two sticks of firewood in the nest box, effectively making it inaccessible. Our coop has two other nest boxes, but “the girls” never use them, so my hope was that if Nellie couldn’t get into her new slumber zone, she’d make for the roost. Unless, of course, she was hurt.
Sure enough, when I checked on the hens while locking them in for the night, the traditional lineup was back in place. Snow, Hope and Nellie were on their perch, side by side and wing to wing. The new normal was out. Once again, the old normal ruled the roost.
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