Hen Chronicles: Braving the elements during a Maine winter

Our four hens set a personal best in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. It's a record that was simultaneously discouraging and encouraging.

How is that possible, you ask?

Allow me to explain.

As I remember it, the coldest it got hereabouts last winter was 5 below. But when I came downstairs well before dawn yesterday morning and checked the thermometer out back, it read 7 below.

That was bad enough, but it only got worse. Over the next two hours the mercury dropped. Repeatedly. By the time I headed out to release “the girls” from their coop at 7 a.m., the thermometer in our back yard, which is where the coop is located, read 10 below.

It was light out by then, so the hens were awake when I arrived on the scene, squawking plaintively and bouncing up and down in the coop. But each of them hesitated at the open door before heading down the ramp and into their pen. It was as if they were trying to size up just how cold it was out there as they decided whether to abandon their "bedroom" and venture forth.

So, chickens can withstand temperatures of 10 below in a small coop that has plenty of fresh bedding inside, bags of leaves banked up outside, and horse blankets on the roof, as ours does. Never underestimate the power of feathers! If experience is the best teacher, I learned an important lesson Tuesday that I'm glad I now know, but one that I wish the hens could have avoided. 

"Chickens can handle very cold temperatures," according to motherearthnews.com. "Some experts say chickens don’t really start suffering until the temperature inside their coop falls to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit. They’ll start suffering earlier if it’s damp inside the chicken house, or if they haven’t become inured to the cold . . . ." 

No major problems until it dips to 20 below in the coop? That’s a claim I hope never to have to verify - or disprove - on my own. Yesterday morning's outside reading of 10 below was nerve-racking enough, thank you very much.

Hen Chronicles: Winter + chickens = a hell of a lot of work

Most mornings, chicken tending is fun, at least for an early riser like me.

This was not one of those mornings.

I knew I was in for a grueling experience when, after walking the dogs in several inches of snow, I cleared the end of the driveway, only to have a city plow with a tremendously long reach rumble by in my moment of victory. After mumbling a few choice words in my preferred language for swearing - French - I grabbed the shovel, started from scratch and eventually drove off to the store to buy the Sunday papers

The Maine Sunday Telegram was on the rack, but The Boston Globe was nowhere to be found. This prompted me to ask the obvious question: is life worth living? But it was almost time to feed the chickens, so I headed home to tackle more mundane concerns.

First, I had to shovel off the deck. Then I had to make a path from the deck to the garage, where I store chicken feed and other supplies for “the girls.” The coop is a good 60 feet or so beyond the garage, so once I had filled the feed bowl, I placed it on the floor next to a jug of water and grabbed the shovel yet again.

Setting out for the coop, I saw that it was completely buried in snow. From a distance, it looked like a large version of a gingerbread house, but that quaint image evaporated once I got back there and went to work clearing the snow from the roof.

Normally when it snows or rains, I place a tarp atop the chicken-wire pen that fronts the coop. But on Saturday it looked like this would be a big storm with lots of snow and a bit of wind. So I pulled out a very large tarp late Saturday afternoon and draped it over the pen, with enough left over to fully cover the east and west sides of the pen as well. I left the south end open, so the girls wouldn’t be completely closed in when they got up in the morning.

It took a while to remove the snow from the tarp-covered pen. While doing so I noticed that the small coop window I keep partially open at night for ventilation was plugged up with snow. So I cleared that off as well, and finally opened the coop door.

There was no sign of the four girls, nor any sound from within. When I lifted the hinged roof to check on the hens, they were all still on the elevated roost, lined up side by side with all of them facing me, like feathered curios neatly arranged on a mantle. They appeared to be half asleep, and did not move, chirp or cluck, but their eyes were open.

With the coop door newly opened and all of the coop’s windows either closed or blocked, the girls probably thought it was midnight until I popped open the roof to peer at them at 7 a.m. or so. But by the time I returned from the garage with food and water moments later, they were wandering around the (still dry) pen, looking for breakfast and probably wondering why the heck their tarp-enclosed run felt unusually claustrophobic.

A couple hours later, I found a warm, freshly laid egg in one of the nest boxes, and another one two hours after that. Life goes on, even during a nasty storm.

Hen Chronicles: Unlike us, chickens are designed for winter

Winter offers the best reminder that chickens aren’t people. Nor are they akin to dogs or cats or hamsters or other domesticated animals which, if they are fortunate enough to have responsible owners, spend their days indoors.

Not that anyone would mistake a chicken for a human based on appearances. Even a two year old spotting a hen for the first time can see that combs and wattles and beaks and feathers and scrawny legs with big dinosaur-like feet must belong to a species far removed from his own.

But it’s easy to assume chickens react to the cold the way we do, and I think that’s where we go wrong.

It was 2 degrees below zero when I headed out to the coop at dawn to release our four hens - Snow, Nala, Hope and Nellie - from their coop. God only knows what the wind chill was.

On mornings like this, your fingers start to tingle after a few minutes outside, even while wearing heavy gloves. In this weather, a woolen cap - what those of us with Québécois roots call a “tuque” - is a mandatory part of my chicken-tending uniform, which also includes boots, jeans, a chamois shirt, a fleece jacket and a heavy scarf, all topped off with an old, beat up L. L. Bean field coat.

When my wife Liz saw me traipsing around the yard in this getup on a somewhat warmer morning recently (wearing a baseball cap instead of a tuque), she said I looked like a guy in a Chevy Silverado commercial - minus the Silverado. I took it as a compliment, but I didn’t verify that interpretation by asking her about it, just in case I was wrong.

“The girls” spend their nights in a four-foot-by-four-foot coop. As I headed back there this morning to let them out, I wondered how they had fared overnight, and how they would react to the frigid new day, even though last winter I made the same trip for the same purpose to the same coop on days that were colder still.

The hens weren’t up yet when I arrived, but the sound of me shuffling around outside as I placed their food and water bowls in the pen woke them. I heard a soft chirping as I walked around the pen to get to the other side of the coop to unlatch the door.

Nala, who molted recently but is almost fully feathered once again, was the first to emerge, followed almost immediately by the other hens. They headed straight for their feed and the scratch I had scattered in the pen as a snack. As I removed the nights “deposits” from the coop and tidied up outside, the hens strutted as hens do, flapping their wings and watching me when I gathered up my supplies to head back to the garage. After a quick bite, one of the Rhode Island Reds walked back into the coop, probably to lay an egg.

I’m not suggesting that chickens are immune to the cold. The girls were moving a bit more slowly than usual first thing this morning. It was obvious to me, as someone familiar with their ways, that they were not overly pleased by this latest meteorological turn of events.

But they took it all in stride, even though there is no central heating in their lives, no sweaters, jackets, scarves or boots, no warm bed with flannel sheets. Like their cousins on the wilder side of the bird world, the hens accepted the frigid cold as their lot and went about their business without complaint.

Down jackets are filled with feathers for a reason, after all. I’m no expert on chicken biology, but the people who are say the chicken’s system for regulating body temperature is entirely different from ours. Maybe it’s superior as well.

Still, Liz probably will make one concession to the cold when she heads out to the coop with a mid-afternoon snack today. In addition to a handful of kale, which chickens love, and a bit of yogurt, she’s likely to bring the girls another favorite: warm oatmeal.

Hen Chronicles: Gearing up for cold nights ahead

Our dogs - Chocolate Lab Aquinnah and Pit Bull mix Martha - were pretty excited when they stepped outside Tuesday morning and into the first snowfall of the season. 

Not so the chickens. 

Normally, “the girls” are awake when I open the coop door at dawn. Sometimes they’re even jumping around at the coop’s windows as I approach, eager to get into the pen because they know bowls of chow and water await them there. 

Tuesday morning was different. A light snow had been falling for an hour, so the ramp leading down from the coop, and the ground in the pen, were decked out in white. To the human eye, it made the pen look fresh and new, but to the chicken eye, it signified change, which is never a good thing. 

The hens stayed on their roost when I put their food and water bowls into the pen. They didn’t even get up when I noisily unfolded a frozen tarp and placed it atop the pen, to prevent more snow from accumulating there. 

By the time I opened the coop’s door, Snow, our Plymouth Rock, had hopped down from the roost to the floor of the coop.  But she showed no interest in going outside, and the other three hens didn't even come down from the roost. 

I tried coaxing them out by shaking their food bowl near the open door, but to no avail, so I headed back to the house. A half hour later, the chickens had yet to emerge from the coop, so I decided to let them be. 

They did come out eventually, after trying to get down without stepping into the snow, which, of course, was impossible. But it wasn’t until an hour or more after I unlatched the coop door and placed food and water in the pen. 

There might have been several explanations for this behavior, but I narrowed it down to one through a process of elimination. The hens were not sick; by late morning, they were strutting around the pen, eating voraciously and demanding snacks. They were not deterred by the temperature, because it was a relatively balmy 30 degrees here in Augusta, Maine, at dawn on Tuesday. The day before, when it was only 15 degrees out, the hens came running down into the pen as soon as I opened the door. 

That left one explanation: the snow. Hope and Nellie, our relatively young Rhode Island Reds, probably had never seen snow before, so I had to cut them some slack. But Snow and Nala, our Barred Rock, arrived on the scene as adult hens in April 2012, so they had plenty of experience with the white stuff last winter. 

I don’t think it’s the snow itself that bothers them as much as the newness of it. Even Snow and Nala, our veterans, had not seen snow for several months when a coating of it greeted them on Tuesday morning. So they had to adjust. 

All of which might suggest that chickens, burdened as they are by the stereotype of birds as dim-witted animals, are too dumb to remember something they encountered only last winter. But they certainly aren’t the only species with that defect. Here in New England, the first snowfall always triggers plenty of fender benders as reckless, speeding motorists who’ve driven in snow all of their lives act as if they, too, have never seen this mystery substance.

Hen Chronicles: Coping with the white stuff

Our dogs - Chocolate Lab Aquinnah and Pit Bull mix Martha - were pretty excited when they stepped outside Tuesday morning and into the first snowfall of the season. 

Not so the chickens. 

Normally, “the girls” are awake when I open the coop door at dawn. Sometimes they’re even jumping around at the coop’s windows as I approach, eager to get into the pen because they know bowls of chow and water await them there. 

Tuesday morning was different. A light snow had been falling for an hour, so the ramp leading down from the coop, and the ground in the pen, were decked out in white. To the human eye, it made the pen look fresh and new, but to the chicken eye, it signified change, which is never a good thing. 

The hens stayed on their roost when I put their food and water bowls into the pen. They didn’t even get up when I noisily unfolded a frozen tarp and placed it atop the pen, to prevent more snow from accumulating there. 

By the time I opened the coop’s door, Snow, our Plymouth Rock, had hopped down from the roost to the floor of the coop.  But she showed no interest in going outside, and the other three hens didn't even come down from the roost. 

I tried coaxing them out by shaking their food bowl near the open door, but to no avail, so I headed back to the house. A half hour later, the chickens had yet to emerge from the coop, so I decided to let them be. 

They did come out eventually, after trying to get down without stepping into the snow, which, of course, was impossible. But it wasn’t until an hour or more after I unlatched the coop door and placed food and water in the pen. 

There might have been several explanations for this behavior, but I narrowed it down to one through a process of elimination. The hens were not sick; by late morning, they were strutting around the pen, eating voraciously and demanding snacks. They were not deterred by the temperature, because it was a relatively balmy 30 degrees here in Augusta, Maine, at dawn on Tuesday. The day before, when it was only 15 degrees out, the hens came running down into the pen as soon as I opened the door. 

That left one explanation: the snow. Hope and Nellie, our relatively young Rhode Island Reds, probably had never seen snow before, so I had to cut them some slack. But Snow and Nala, our Barred Rock, arrived on the scene as adult hens in April 2012, so they had plenty of experience with the white stuff last winter. 

I don’t think it’s the snow itself that bothers them as much as the newness of it. Even Snow and Nala, our veterans, had not seen snow for several months when a coating of it greeted them on Tuesday morning. So they had to adjust. 

All of which might suggest that chickens, burdened as they are by the stereotype of birds as dim-witted animals, are too dumb to remember something they encountered only last winter. But they certainly aren’t the only species with that defect. Here in New England, the first snowfall always triggers plenty of fender benders as reckless, speeding motorists who’ve driven in snow all of their lives act as if they, too, have never seen this mystery substance.

Hen Chronicles: Suffering through the molt takes patience

When I lifted the roof of our chicken coop one morning two weeks ago to clean out the previous nights “offerings,” it looked like a fox had made off with Nala, leaving nothing behind but a mountain of feathers.

Fortunately, I knew that wasn’t the case. Our Barred Rock had hopped down into the pen with the other hens moments earlier, when I opened the coop door to let “the girls” out for the day.

No, this wasn’t the work of some chicken-loving varmint.

The dreaded molt was upon us.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines molt as “to lose a covering of hair, feathers, etc., and replace it with new growth in the same place.” That sounds straightforward enough, but reading about molting and seeing it in action are two different things.

Chickens molt “at approximately one-year intervals,” usually during the late summer or early fall, according to The Chicken Encyclopedia, by Gail Damerow. Molting is “a natural process, not a disease,” says Raising Chickens for Dummies. The idea is that new feathers better protect a chicken during the cold-weather months.
 

Nala, before she lost her clothes

Molting is predictable and recurring and beneficial. But it sure ain’t pretty.

Snow, our Plymouth Rock, has been going through a so-called “soft molt” this fall. “A soft molt means the feathers are lost and regrown gradually. Sometimes you may hardly notice a soft molt, except as a reduction in laying,” mypetchicken.com explains.

In Snow’s case, she lost a batch of feathers about a month ago, but only on isolated portions of her body. As a result, her plumage is now an odd mix of pristine new feathers, which are so brilliantly white that they look freshly bleached, and off-white old feathers. Her molt would not be obvious to the casual observer.

Nala is another story. She’s going through what mypetchicken.com calls a "hard molt," which means “all the feathers are lost almost at once so molting is over relatively quickly.”

When I peered into the coop that morning two weeks ago, the pine shavings on the floor were littered with what appeared to be hundreds of feathers. I knew they were Nala’s because the feathers had the distinctive alternating black and white bars of a Barred Rock, and Nala is our only Barred Rock. (In addition to the all-white Snow, we have two Rhode Island Reds who are- yup - red.)

That first day, Nala still looked like she was fully feathered, despite evidence to the contrary in the coop and in the pen. But that quickly changed. The following morning, the coop contained a new batch of black and white feathers, which I cleaned out. The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that, and every day for a week or more.

If garden gnomes were in the habit of buying tiny down pillows, we could have cornered the market.

Nala quickly went from fluffy to shabby to pathetic. Her bum was practically bald, her neck was bare and the plumage on the rest of her body could best be described as spotty. We could even see the partially exposed quills from some of her remaining wing feathers. She seemed to lose a tremendous amount of weight in a matter of days, although that was an illusion because a fully feathered chicken looks much bigger than it really is.

For several days, I held my breath. Nala lost more and more of her feathers, stopped laying eggs and shied away from any physical contact with the other hens. Finally, a week or so into the process, new feathers began to emerge, first on her neck and later elsewhere on her body. These "pin feathers" are tightly rolled and look like quills, until they finally open up to reveal that they are the real deal.

The experts say a molt can take weeks, even months. Nala continues to drop feathers, but nowhere near as many as she did during that first week. At this point, she looks like Frankenstein’s chicken, a partially bald creature assembled from spikes and other spare parts. But she becomes a bit more recognizable every day, thanks to Mother Nature’s remarkable mechanism for replacing old, discarded feathers with brand new ones.

Hen Chronicles: Yup, chickens have personalities too

Miss Personality

Anyone who has lived with a cat or a dog can attest to the fact that our four-legged friends have individual personalities. What may be less obvious to most people is that the feathered set does as well.

That certainly is true of our four hens. But none of them illustrates the point more strongly than Snow, our Plymouth Rock, who has been with us now since April of last year.

Snow is the bossiest, noisiest, most animated member of our quartet, protesting loudly if a mere human has the audacity to show up anywhere near the pen without snacks in hand.

She is the most demanding of the four when it comes to food, flapping her wings and even trying to escape through a narrow opening at the top of the pen if it takes Liz or myself too long to distribute treats.

She is by far the most alert and assertive of our hens if anyone throws a tasty worm into the pen. Almost without fail, she catches every worm that comes their way, frustrating the other hens no end.

Snow lays the largest eggs in our tiny flock, and she is the most troublesome of the bunch in that department, having become egg bound a while back. That is a potentially fatal condition in which a hen has an egg in transit but cannot manage to lay it, although in Snow’s case human intervention, her own persistence and a bit of luck saved the day.

I was reminded of Snow’s unique status yet again when I went out to the coop just before dawn Thursday morning to release the hens into the pen and feed them. Without fail, “the girls” troop into the coop at dusk and demand to be let out at dawn, but I was surprised to hear squawking and complaining when I got out there Thursday morning, because it was still dark out.

It struck me as odd that the hens were chafing at the beak before the sun rose. And it would have been odd, had it been true.

A closer look revealed that only one hen - Snow - was bouncing up and down at the window on the front of the coop, wailing mournfully as if she’d been stuck in there for a week. When I unlatched and opened the door, Snow was the only hen who ran down the ramp. About 30 seconds later, I heard Nala, Hope and Nellie hop down from the roost to the floor of the coop, meaning they were still asleep - or at least not yet up - while Snow was making her “let me outta here” display.

Hen Chronicles: Molting takes a strange turn

The day-to-day task of caring for our four hens is fairly predictable. Chickens are creatures of habit. “The girls” rise at the crack of dawn, immediately wolf down their breakfast and then strut around their pen all day in search of wayward worms and other delicacies. They lay their eggs in their nest boxes, hop up and down with joy whenever someone shows up with snacks, and troop back into the coop at night to roost.

So I was taken aback by the novelty of what I saw the other day when I showed up at the pen with a late-morning treat of mealworms, kale and late-season raspberries from our garden. But more on that in a minute.

Snow, our Plymouth Rock, is molting. This is a normal, supposedly annual, process during which a chicken loses some, most or all of its feathers and grows new ones. It isn’t pretty, especially if a hen’s neck or butt goes bare almost overnight, but such is life on Planet Chicken.

As a result of Snow’s molt, the pen is littered with white feathers whose shelf life has expired. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing this of late, but the molt took an unusual turn on the day in question when I popped out to the pen with those snacks that I mentioned earlier.

Sure enough, a smattering of white feathers covered the ground in the pen. No surprise there. All four hens clucked, squawked and jumped excitedly as they awaited their treats. Nothing out of the ordinary there either. But then I noticed that Nala, our Barred Rock, had donned a new accessory.

Nala is not molting. She remains fully feathered. Her feathers have alternating black and white bands, so there’s no mistaking her for the all-white Snow. That’s why the long, brilliantly white feather that pointed skyward from her bum was so eye-catching. She looked like a comical excuse for a peacock, with a lone feather in her display, and a monochromatic one at that. (No, I didn't have a camera.)

God only knows how one of Snow’s discards affixed itself to Nala’s nether regions. My guess is that a stray bit of poop may have doubled as an adhesive. But I didn’t go in for a closer look to test my theory. Curiosity has its limits.

Snow and Nala (before Nala started wearing Snow's "clothes.")

Hen Chronicles: Finally, the pullets fit in with the veterans

When two Rhode Island Red pullets arrived on the scene back in May, Snow and Nala, our older, well-established hens, did not take to the newcomers.

At first, we separated Hope and Nellie from the old-timers during daylight hours because the kids were still on pullet feed, not the laying feed that Snow and Nala eat. But all four of them found themselves sharing the same coop at night. There was much squawking and jostling and bumping in there as they went about the business of establishing a pecking order.

Later on, when the Reds were old enough to make the switch to an adult feed, Hope and Nellie refused to emerge from the coop in the morning to eat with Snow and Nala in their pen. On those rare occasions when one or both of the Reds did venture into the pen, Nala pecked at them noisily, and chased them. Flapping their wings and sounding half scared to death, the terrified Reds quickly retreated into the coop, where Snow and Nala rarely venture during the day.

As these face-offs continued, week after week, it was hard to imagine that the hens would ever learn to get along. Yet nowadays, the scene that greets me at dawn when I release “the girls” from the coop to feed and water them is far different.

Not only do all four hens have a peaceful breakfast in the pen every day without fail, but they share one bowl of feed, often at the same time. I still find myself doing a double take whenever I spot Snow, Nala, Hope and Nellie all gathered around that bowl, munching quietly and happily without so much as a wayward squawk or a sidelong shove.

Unlike the inflexible tea party crowd in Washington, our hens compromised and adapted over time, so they could coexist. If you compare that to recent events on Capitol Hill, it seems the real bird brains are not to be found in a chicken coop.

Hen Chronicles: Chickens get up early, but not that early

I’ve read that chickens, ever alert to their surroundings, will not eat in the dark. This means, of course, that they won’t chow down at night. But I didn’t realize until recently that it applies to their morning routine as well.

As the days grow shorter, I’ve grudgingly pushed back my dawn trips out to the coop to release “the girls” and give them food and water. The goal is to get out there as soon as they awake at first light. That's when they start bouncing around in the coop in a frantic bid to escape their confinement. Usually, they're in full jack-in-the-box mode by the time I arrive.

Sometimes, though, my eagerness gets the best of me, and I find myself at the coop before our four hens are up and about. On those rare occasions, I know they’re still asleep because they aren’t jumping in the window and squawking balefully to protest the injustice of their imprisonment.

Even then, the hens normally wake up quickly once I start shuffling around outside with their water bowl and feed dish. They drop down from the roost to the floor of the coop with a thud, eager to be let out into their pen, where they immediately make short order of a hearty breakfast.

But things played out a little differently when I showed up shortly after 6 a.m. on Tuesday. It was quite dark out, and the hens were still roosting. Even after I put their food and water bowls in the pen, there was only a soft, halfhearted clucking coming from the coop, rather than the loud complaints of fully awake birds who want out.

When I opened the coop door, Snow, Hope and Nellie stumbled out. A full minute or two passed before Nala hopped off the roost and made her way out into the pen as well.

Amazingly, the normally ravenous hens did not touch their feed, or the snack I had scattered on the ground for them. I guess it was still too early in the day. They just stood there, looking nervous as they craned their necks and turned their heads this way and that, as if trying to peer through the darkness.

Perhaps instinct warns them to be wary of raccoons and other predators in the dark. Whatever the cause, they looked like they feared they were living life on the edge by being up that early. A few minutes later, when dawn finally broke, they hit the feed bowl with their usual gusto.

And so, another lesson learned: You can open the Chicken Little Cafe before dawn, but don’t expect any customers.

Hen Chronicles: A chicken dad screws up

Our four voracious hens strike up the band whenever they see me heading toward their coop and pen at the back end of our lot. That’s because I almost always bring treats when I pay them a visit.

So I wasn’t surprised Sunday morning when the chickens started squawking as I prepared to place a tarp over their pen, to shield them from the rain. Once I had the temporary covering in place, I pulled up some dandelion greens - one of their favorite snacks - and tossed them into the pen.

But that didn’t quiet them down.
 
I then noticed that the hens had knocked over their water bowl. So I carried it to the house, used the hose to refill it, and brought it back to the pen.
 
Yet the squawking continued.

That's when I finally spotted the real problem. The door to the coop, which I had closed hours earlier to keep “the girls” out in the pen while I removed poop from the coop, remained shut. I had forgotten to reopen it when I finished mucking out the coop at 6:15, and it was now 8:30. So for more than two hours, the hens had been unable to get to their nest boxes in the coop, where they normally lay their eggs.

As soon as I reopened the door, Snow, our white Plymouth Rock, raced into the coop. And the chorus of squawking subsided.

No doubt about it. There was a dumb cluck out by the coop Sunday morning, all right. But it didn’t have a beak or feathers.

Our coop, with the door . . . open!

Hen Chronicles: A wakeful chicken is a talkative chicken

There's one question about chicken behavior that I’d never even thought to ask. Until the answer presented itself, unbidden.

It happened last Thursday. I went out to the coop at dawn, to release the hens and give them food and water. "The girls" are always waiting for me when I arrive at that hour, bouncing around at the windows and squawking balefully to be let out, as if they’d been stuck inside for a week rather than overnight.
 

But not that morning. Even before I got back there, I realized something was amiss.

As I approached the coop, there were no chicken heads bobbing up and down. There was no clucking. No thrashing about in a desperate bid for freedom. No sign of life at all.

My panic quickly subsided as common sense kicked in. Either I was a bit early or the hens were a bit late. For possibly the first time ever, I got to the coop while the girls were still roosting and asleep.

They woke up in unison as soon as they heard me shuffling around outside. I know this because they began chattering all at once, within seconds of my arrival. It was as if someone had flipped a switch that instantly activated all four hens simultaneously.

From outside, I could tell the clucking came from a point just beneath the peak of the coop’s pitched roof, which meant they were still up there, on the roost. But only for a few seconds. When I placed their food and water bowls in the pen that’s attached to the coop, I heard the girls landing heavily on the coop floor, as they jumped down like poultry paratroopers.

Only then did I realize that I now had the answer to a question I’d never asked: Do chickens start clucking as soon as they awake? Or does it take them a few minutes to get their engines running, like a human who can't function without that first cup of coffee?

The answer, I can say from experience, is the former. Unless she’s sick, a conscious hen is a talking hen, from the very moment she opens her eyes to a new day.

Snow, Nala, Hope and Nellie . . . awake and searching for treats.

Hen Chronicles: Maybe size does matter

One of our Rhode Island Reds

If I had given it any thought before we started keeping chickens, I suppose I would have assumed that a hen will lay eggs that are consistently small, medium or large from the get-go. I did have a vague inkling that egg sizes vary among breeds, but not that the size may also depend on a hen’s age.

In this matter, I was clueless. It turns out that new layers produce undersized eggs at the outset, even if they belong to a breed known for its hefty offerings. “A pullet starts out laying small eggs, but as time goes by her eggs reach normal size for her breed,” Gail Damerow writes in The Chicken Encyclopedia.

So it is with our two Rhode Island Reds, who only began laying in July, right around the time they reached six months of age.

Hope and Nellie are remarkably productive, at least so far. Each of them is cranking out an egg a day. But their eggs are noticeably smaller than those produced somewhat less frequently by Snow and Nala, our older Plymouth Rock and Barred Rock.
 

The Reds’ eggs are growing bit by bit from week to week, but so slowly that the change is incremental. If size matters in this context, Hope and Nellie still have a ways to go to catch up with their coop mates, although their small eggs are every bit as tasty as the larger ones.

There’s more at stake here than the poultry equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses, however. The Rhode Island Red, which has been around since the 1850s, is a breed with a reputation for laying large eggs. So Hope and Nellie have well over a hundred years of tradition to uphold. In effect, the honor of the family name is at stake.

From left to right, the 1st, 3rd and 5th eggs were laid by Nellie and Hope, the new kids in the coop. When they began laying last month, their eggs were even smaller than they are now.

Hen Chronicles: Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?

Even healthy hens stop laying eventually, and although we are nowhere near that point in the lives of our quartet, a recent newspaper article reminded me that the day will come when the eggs stop coming.
 
Hens can lay into their teens, the experts say. But their productivity slows, and may even stop altogether, before that. So the question is obvious. What will become of our chickens when they no longer earn their keep?

Plymouth Rock Snow and Barred Rock Nala are of indeterminate age. When we bought them in April of last year, they were fully grown and laying regularly. The seller led us to believe that Snow, Nala and a third hen who later died had not been laying for very long. Hens start laying at about six months of age, so we figure Snow and Nala were born in 2011.

Hope and Nellie, our Rhode Island Reds, are even younger. They both hit the six-month mark a few weeks ago. They are still so new to the laying game that their eggs are smaller than normal, but they are producing them regularly, after a bit of a late start.

With any luck, all four hens will continue to deposit tasty treats in their nest box for years to come. But when “the girls” do reach “henopause,” what will we do with them?

The newspaper story pointed out that some hens end up on the dinner table at that point. Or they get traded to other chicken keepers who may, in turn, pop them into the oven. But the point of the story was that many urban chickens are viewed as pets, so they continue to hang around even after their laying years have come and gone.

On that score, my wife Liz and I agree with Teresa Kelly of Roeland Park, Kansas, who was quoted in the article as saying: “I cannot eat anything that I’ve made eye contact with.” Our hens will never see the inside of a kitchen unless they ask for a tour.

Ah, but we love fresh eggs! And our coop is designed for no more than four chickens. So if we eventually reach the point where the girls become freeloaders, will we have to resort to eating (gasp!) store-bought eggs?

I ran that by Liz the other day. She replied without a moment’s hesitation.

“I’ve thought about that,” she said in a businesslike voice that suggested debate was not an option. “We’d just have to get another coop.”

Hmmm . . . a two-coop scenario. One would house egg-producing hens. And the other would be the poultry equivalent of . . . a nursing home!
  

Hen Chronicles: Helping "the girls" keep their cool

It seems natural to worry more about keeping chickens warm in the winter than cool in the summer, but it turns out those priorities should be reversed.

“Chickens actually handle cold better than heat, as long as their shelter is dry and out of the wind,” Kimberly Willis and Rob Ludlow write in Raising Chickens for Dummies. As for summer: “When the temperature rises above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, especially when the humidity is high, it’s time to check on the chickens. If your birds are subjected to heat stress for too long, they’ll die.”
 
That caught my attention.

My limited experience with chickens has confirmed that they do, indeed, hold their own during the winter. We lost one hen last December, but she died while molting early in the month, when the ground had yet to freeze. Snow and Nala, the surviving hens, got through the winter just fine. Even on January 24, when it was 5 degrees below zero at dawn with a wind chill of minus 20, Snow and Nala were active, hungry and seemingly comfortable.

The heat, though, is another story. Earlier this month, the temperature here in central Maine reached or exceeded 90 degrees every day for a week, peaking at 93/94 a few times. That may not be stifling where you come from, but it’s hellish (literally) by Maine standards.

We had four hens by then - Snow and Nala, as well as two younger newcomers, Hope and Nellie. “The girls” seemed fine in the coop at night, when the mercury dropped enough to make life bearable for them, but they obviously were stressed out during the day.

Feathers, like fur, insulate.

I did my best to keep the hens cool, using an old patio umbrella, a tarp and pieces of plywood to shade the pen that is attached to the coop. The hens also had the option of resting under the elevated coop, where it is dark and, presumably, a bit cooler. Chickens supposedly dislike warm water, so I gave them cold water periodically, sometimes adding ice cubes to keep it cool longer.

But the girls obviously were uncomfortable. For one thing, they were breathing with their mouths open. Fortunately, they were not holding their wings out, away from their bodies. From what I’ve read, that means the heat is really getting to them. 

There was only so much I could do; controlling the weather wasn't in my tool kit. Then I stumbled upon a suggestion in an online forum from a chicken owner who places one or more frozen bottles of water in his pen. The idea is to give the hens something cool to brush up against in the heat of the day.

It sounded crazy, but what did I have to lose? I bought a 2-liter bottle of ginger ale, the contents of which my wife Liz emptied into a pitcher. Filling the bottle with water, I stuck it in the freezer. It didn’t do us any good that day; it takes a long time to freeze the contents of a large bottle. But the following morning, the bottle was hard as a rock and just as heavy. When the temperature topped 90 later that day, I brought it out to the four-foot-by-six-foot pen and placed it inside.

I don’t really know if my experiment worked; I didn’t see any of the hens snuggled up against my “air conditioner” when I went back out to check on them. Maybe they sidled up to it when I wasn’t looking. Maybe not. Either way, it took a long time for that block of ice to melt, and that left me feeling that I was doing what I could to help the girls cope.

Chicken air conditioning?

Hen Chronicles: To lay or not to lay, that is the question

To lay or not to lay. That is the question, at least in our henhouse.

The oldest of our four hens, Plymouth Rocks Snow and Nala, have been producing eggs since we bought them back in April of last year. But the new girls, Rhode Island Reds Hope and Nellie, whom we acquired in May of this year, were too young to do so until recently.

The conventional wisdom is that hens start laying when they’re about 24 weeks old, a milestone that Hope and Nellie reached two or three weeks ago. Unfortunately, the Reds never got the memo telling them they should become productive members of society once they had celebrated their six-month birthdays.

The Reds - or one of them, at least - have been laying very sporadically, as shown by the occasional egg with a soft shell, or the very light-colored egg with a rough surface that turned up about a week ago. The experts say it can take new layers a while to get the hang of the thing, so their initial offerings can be oddly shaped, or thin, or small, or bumpy. Not to mention few and far between. To make matters worse, the normally reliable Snow and Nala decided to stage a work slowdown when we got hit with a week-long heat wave earlier this month.

The upshot of all this is that I’ve been feeding and caring for four hens while collecting only one egg - two at the most - every day. So you can imagine my relief last Saturday when I went out to the coop and found not one, not two, but three eggs neatly nestled in the pine shavings that provide bedding in the nest box.

All three eggs had firm shells. And all of them were smooth and well-formed. Two of the eggs were large, suggesting that they were the work of Snow and Nala. The third was tiny, by chicken standards, meaning either Nellie or Hope was trying to earn her keep as well.

The same thing happened all over again on Sunday, and today as well. Each new day brought three more eggs.

As I carried that first clutch back to the house on Saturday, I found myself feeling almost euphoric at the prospect of having three eggs to wash and refrigerate. That might strike some as an overreaction, but I think it’s good for the soul when we find joy in the smaller blessings that life sometimes provides.

Saturday's harvest: notice how small the bottom egg is, compared to the others.

Hen Chronicles: Our Plymouth Rock, Snow, gets plugged up

Snow

Our “girls” have been producing fewer eggs lately. My guess is that it’s partly due to the excessive heat we’ve been having here in central Maine (at least by Maine standards). But when I let the hens out of their coop Monday morning, I knew the weather wasn’t our only problem.

As soon as the chickens race down into their pen at dawn, they make a beeline for their food bowls or, rarely, the water bowl. That’s just what Nala, Hope and Nellie did Monday morning. But Snow, our white Plymouth Rock, showed no interest in eating or drinking. She slowly walked around the pen as if in a daze, even lying down occasionally and half closing her eyes. And she wasn’t talking, an almost sure sign of trouble in a chicken because healthy hens chatter constantly and Snow is by far the noisiest hen in our quartet.

Liz and I immediately suspected that Snow might be “egg bound,” which Gail Damerow defines in The Chicken Encyclopedia as: “A condition in which an egg gets stuck just inside the vent,” the chicken’s rear end. This can be, Damerow warns ominously, “an extremely serious condition.” Other experts agree.

After we isolated Snow by putting her in a separate pen, we consulted Damerow on what to do next. Her instructions weren’t pleasant, because the stuck egg (if there was one) wasn't visible near the opening of the vent.

So we had to go foraging.

“If the egg is not visible,” Damerow writes, “lubricate a finger with K-Y Jelly or other water-based lubricant and gently insert it into the vent until you feel the hard shell with the end of your finger. Do not attempt to stretch the vent, which could tear delicate tissue.”

And to think chicken aficionados claim owning them is lots of fun!

While I held Snow aloft, Liz lubricated her finger and boldly inserted it where no finger had gone before. The good news was that Snow put up no protest. The bad news was that Liz could not feel an egg.

Still, we refused to give up on egg binding as a likely explanation for Snow’s lethargy, probably because we had no alternative diagnosis at hand.
 
Liz and I gave Snow a bath in a tub of warm, soapy water, hoping that would help get things moving internally. We then allowed her to “free range” in the yard for a bit while Liz followed her around, on the theory that exercise also might help to loosen things up.

Within minutes, Snow deposited an egg as she walked by the pen that held the other chickens. It wasn’t a very good egg as eggs go, because it was soft and the shell broke. But it was an egg nonetheless.

Sure enough, Snow was her old self almost immediately. She regained her appetite. Her energy level bounced back. And she started gabbing, to let us know that she wanted to rejoin the other hens. We left her in her own pen for a while, until she had more time to dry off from her bath. But a happy reunion occurred shortly thereafter.

Hen Chronicles: Chickens believe we exist to feed them

I finally tackled a long overdue weeding of the garlic and basil beds yesterday, both of which are located only a few yards from the chicken coop and pen.

As I got down to work at about 3 p.m., the older hens (and pecking-order queens) Snow and Nala set to squawking in an obvious attempt to get my attention, while newcomers Hope and Nellie looked on expectantly. “The girls” clearly believe that any human who comes within their field of vision must be armed with snacks and treats. That is, after all, why humans exist.

Imagine their dismay, then, when I ignored the noisy pleas and continued weeding. Snow and Nala cried even louder in the face of this outrage. Their complaints continued for half an hour or so, before they finally concluded that the early onset of senility must have left me clueless as to my proper role.

Today, weather permitting, I’ll tackle the potato bed, which is even closer to the chickens’ run. Maybe I should wear sound-deadening ear muffs, to protect what little hearing I have left after yesterday's excursion.

Hen Chronicles: Harmony in the coop

When it comes to our chickens, I’m easily pleased. If the hens eat well, lay regularly and show no signs of disease, I become positively gleeful, however briefly. Then my worrywort gene asserts itself and I cook up a problem - real, imagined or prospective - to agonize over.

As it happens, I’m in cheerful mode at the moment. It won’t last long, me being me, so I figured I’d take note of it before it evaporates, like facts at a political convention.

First, some context. We have four hens: Snow, Nala, Nellie and Hope. The Plymouth Rocks, Snow and Nala, are our veterans. We bought them in April of last year. The Rhode Island Reds, Nellie and Hope, are six months old, and we’ve had them for about two months.

Since the Reds arrived, all four hens have been sharing a coop at night. But for the first month or more, we separated Nellie and Hope from Snow and Nala during the day because the Reds were still eating “growth feed” and the Rocks were on “laying feed.”

By mid June, the Reds had grown enough to make the switch to adult feed, so they started sharing both coop and pen with the Rocks during the day. At least in theory. Thanks to what was then a relatively new pecking order, the Reds basically refused to leave the coop during the day to join the Rocks in the pen, despite all my cajoling with food and treats. This continued for more than two weeks.

Things got so bad that, when the temperature climbed to 93 degrees one day, we found the Reds on the elevated roost in the coop, which was the hottest place they could possibly have parked themselves. They were so overheated up there that their breathing was visibly labored, so we removed them from the coop and put them in a freestanding pen, away from the Rocks. Their breathing immediately returned to normal.

Last week, Liz and I entrusted the care of “the girls” to friends while we took off for our annual vacation on the coast of Maine. As the mercury climbed, I fretted about the Reds holing up on the roost again. But the folks who were caring for the chickens assured us that the Reds were getting out into the pen more than they had been.

I remained skeptical, but now I’ve finally seen this change for myself. When I opened the coop door at dawn on Monday to let the girls out into the pen, Snow and Nala burst forth like feathered whirlwinds, as they always do. But instead of hanging back fearfully in the entryway, the Reds followed suit.

Within seconds, all four hens were strolling and eating and drinking and clucking their way around the run. At long last, the pecking order has been accepted by all. Each hen knows her place, so there’s no significant fighting and far less hiding. Everyone is getting along - of a fashion. Harmony, or what passes for it on Planet Chicken, reigns. Just as Mother Nature intended. 

Hen Chronicles: Missing "the girls" while on vacation

Our chickens are demanding little rascals - especially Snow and Nala, the Plymouth Rocks who have been living at our place now for more than a year.

I’m convinced that they see me as their slave, an underling whose purpose in life is to feed them treats at regular intervals, even if I'm busy with other chores, like cleaning their coop or lugging fresh water out to them.

The six-month-old newcomers, Rhode Island Reds Hope and Nellie, are still somewhat unsure of themselves after two months with us. They’re at the bottom of the pecking order, so they aren’t as bossy as the older girls.

But thanks to their insecurities, and their low standing in the flock, Hope and Nellie have created their own set of problems. They're still reluctant to leave the coop and head into the pen during the day, while Snow and Nala are out there. That complicates things. The four hens don't often eat together. And it’s harder to clean the coop when getting everyone to vacate the premises simultaneously is such a big production.
 
Yummy eggs from backyard chickens come at a price.

Having been out of town for the past week, I admit that I didn’t miss trudging out to the coop at the crack of dawn to release and feed the hens. Nor did I miss de-pooping the coop, periodically checking water bowls in the course of the day, finding raspberries and other exotic treats to silence the squawking, or tucking the girls in every night. Friends have been handling those jobs.

But we'll be heading home tomorrow, and I have to be honest. I’m looking forward to seeing my feathered troublemakers, even if they immediately start squawking that they’re overdue for snacks, and their coop isn’t as pristine as it should be, and they’re overdue for snacks, and their water bowls are a bit muddy because they stepped in them, and they’re overdue for snacks, and . . . .