Do hens have a sense of humor? I've been asking myself that question lately, thanks to the antics of our most timid chicken, Hope.
A Rhode Island Red, Hope always is reluctant to get up on cold winter mornings, unlike Snow and Nellie, who bolt into the pen as soon as I unlatch the coop door. Invariably, Hope stays behind on the roost and trills the way chickens do when they’re upset, presumably because she feels she’s been abandoned by her pals.
I like to get all three hens into the pen first thing in the morning so I can clean the coop while they’re outside, eating breakfast. So I had been nudging Hope off the roost and out of the coop at dawn, paving the way for the poop pickup. But Hope was so consistently reluctant to adhere to my schedule that I recently decided to let her rouse herself when she sees fit, even if that requires postponing the cleanup until later in the day.
So now we have a new routine.
Plymouth Rock Snow and Rhode Island Red Nellie still run out to the pen every morning. I then lift the coop’s hinged roof to ask — not force — Hope to join them, which she almost never agrees to do. She just eyes me defiantly from her perch, so I head back to the house. Then, the inevitable. Peeking out at the pen through a window, I see that Hope is now outside with the other hens.
She won’t budge while I’m on her turf, but as soon I concede defeat and retreat, out she comes. My wife Liz finds this terribly amusing.
“I think,” she said after one such encounter Sunday morning, “that Hope is playing games with you.”
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