Hen Chronicles: They never dream of a white Christmas

When I put “the girls” to bed at dusk on Thursday, the weather forecast said nothing about overnight flurries. So I didn’t bother covering the pen with a tarp, as I normally do when it snows, only to discover Friday morning that, once again, the meteorological gurus got it wrong.

Snow blanketed the yard and everything in it, including the pen.

In theory, that should have been no big deal. It was only a dusting. But our three hens view any amount of snow with a mixture of loathing and terror, probably because they’ve rarely had to deal with it in their pen. When I unlatched the coop door at dawn on Friday to release them, they saw white and quickly decided that the end times were at hand.

Nellie, a Rhode Island Red, stuck her head out and craned her neck this way and that, surveying the apparent destruction of her world. Concluding that the apocalypse was underway, she refused to even set foot on the ramp. Snow, our usually assertive Plymouth Rock, peered over Nellie’s wing but made no effort to push her aside. Hope, our other Rhode Island Red, was nowhere to be seen from my vantage point, which probably meant she had refused to leave the safety of the roost.

When I checked again an hour later, Nellie had bravely worked her way out into the pen, but then she lost her nerve. I found her pressed against the front of the coop, as if to avoid the fateful contamination that would result if she actually walked in the snow.

I finally lured everyone out with the hens’ favorite snack: mealworms. Once outside, they chattered and clucked much more animatedly than usual, as if hashing over the horrific ordeal they had endured on The Morning After The Sky Fell.