Hen Chronicles: “I don’t wanna” is the refrain du jour

The first significant snowfall of the season is falling hard and fast here in central Maine. I didn’t wanna trudge through the yard to the coop at dawn, brush snow from the roof and the nest-box lid, remove the bagged leaves that I had placed outside the coop late yesterday to provide insulation overnight, and then defrost frozen latches before I finally opened the coop door.

Nellie came right out into the pen for breakfast, but the normally voracious Snow didn’t wanna. She stuck her head out the door and immediately pulled it back, like a turtle withdrawing into its shell. Eventually, she relented.

Hope, always the last of the three hens to get up in the morning, really didn’t wanna leave the roost. And once she did, she didn’t wanna head outside, even though the pen is temporarily covered by a tarp. I would have left her to her own devices, except that I needed to do something I didn’t wanna: clean the coop to remove the night’s “deposits.”

All of us (except the cooperative Nellie) were feeling rebellious this morning. We didn’t wanna. But we did.

Hen Chronicles: Now I lay me down to sleep . . .

I sometimes wonder what rhyme or reason dictates how our three hens configure themselves at bedtime.

Except on those rare occasions when Nellie decides to spend the night in the nest box, Snow, Nellie and Hope share a perch that runs along a north/south axis in the coop, just below the peak of the roof. They snuggle on this roost side by side, and usually wing to wing.

Sometimes, one or two of the hens will bed down on the roost facing west, but for the most part, all three chickens face east. And nine times out of 10, the lineup finds Snow in the middle, with Nellie and Hope on either side of her.

As her name suggests, Snow is an all-white Plymouth Rock. She's our senior hen, at an estimated four years of age, and the one we've had the longest. She’s also at the top of the pecking order. Nellie and Hope are three-year-old Rhode Island Reds, so both share the rust-red coloring of that breed. Liz and I can differentiate between Nellie and Hope because we see them every day, but to a stranger, they probably would appear to be interchangeable.

It’s hard to believe that the predictable and recurring sleeping arrangements, with Snow flanked by the Reds, are random; there's so little variation from one night to the next. Instead, we have consistency. Perhaps the Reds, recognizing Snow’s seniority, like to sleep next to her, and Snow finds herself in the middle because that’s the only way both Nellie and Hope can be adjacent to her. Or maybe there’s some other explanation that defies human understanding.

Whatever the cause, the placement makes for an attractive tableau. Thanks to the contrast in coloring, I think of the display as Snow and her court. The large and strikingly white queen of the roost has a lady-in-waiting on either side of her.

Hen Chronicles: It's early to bed and late to rise for our flock

Our three hens must have been particularly well-rested when they got up at dawn.

Credit the winter solstice.

The shortest day of the year came and went quickly yesterday, followed by the longest night. As a result, Snow, Nellie and Hope were up and about for a paltry nine hours on Monday.

“The girls” didn't emerge from the coop until 7  a.m. yesterday, and they put themselves to bed about 4 p.m. (They always head into the coop on their own at dusk.) They were still awake a few minutes later when I worked my way back to the coop to lock them in, but they had settled down for the night, side by side on their roost. Assuming they nodded off by 5 p.m. or so, they were in slumberland for a full 14 hours, until they finally roused themselves at 7 o’clock this morning.

That's a lot of shut-eye. If you're designed to hang out with the sandman from dusk until dawn, as chickens are, there’s no risk of sleep deprivation at this time of year.

Hen Chronicles: The answer may be blowin' in the wind

The day got off to an odd start this morning. Not unprecedented, by any means, but unusual nonetheless.

On a typical day, Snow and Nellie will run down the ramp and into their pen as soon as I unlatch the coop door. More often than not, I have to nudge Hope to get her off the roost, but she then heads outside without further ado. Once “the girls” are in the pen, they dig right into their breakfast of pellets and scratch.

Not this day.

Nellie and Snow raced into the pen like usual, but instead of getting down to business they strutted, clucking nervously and keeping a keen eye on their surroundings. Meanwhile, Hope was reluctant to leave the coop even after I “persuaded” her to hop down from the roost. Instead, she just peeked out until I gave her a gentle tap on the fanny.

One possibility is that the hens saw, heard or smelled a wild animal, perhaps a skunk or a raccoon, prowling around outside before I arrived on the scene to let the girls out. Raccoons are known chicken predators, and although the experts say a skunk is unlikely to kill an adult hen, it does happen. In any case, skunks are attracted to coops because they love to steal eggs.

But this strikes me as a more likely scenario. I noticed a long time ago that chickens do not like windy conditions, and it was quite breezy early this morning. Breezy and cold: 25 degrees at dawn. By the time I went back out to check on the hens an hour later, the wind had picked up and all three chickens had retreated into the coop. Snow was perched on the roost; Nellie and Hope were roaming around on the floor, talking softly.

Once I saw that the chickens were okay, I raced back into the house. I'm not a big fan of a chill wind, first thing in the morning. Just like the chickens.

Hen Chronicles: The pecking order . . . it's what really matters

Nellie, the only one of our three hens who’s still molting, looks like a child’s craft project gone awry. Missing feathers. Loose, soon-to-be-discarded feathers. Emerging replacement feathers that haven't unfurled yet. It’s as if an easily distracted kid decided to make a papier-mâché chicken, ran out of parts, got bored and finally gave up.

But molt or no molt, the coop’s hierarchy remains intact. Snow, our Plymouth Rock, rules the roost, followed by No. 2 Nellie, a Rhode Island Red. Nellie’s fellow Red, Hope, brings up the rear. Thus it has been for well over a year, and thus it remains.

So I suppose it should come as no surprise that even though Nellie is the only pathetic-looking member of our flock at the moment, seemingly vulnerable and obviously not at her best, she still brings her A game to the hunt for snacks. As "the girls" race to gobble down mealworms, Nellie defers to Snow, but nudges Hope aside with a brief flurry of squawking, simulated attacking and gentle pecking. This forces the put-upon but clever Hope to devise circuitous routes to the goodies, thereby assuring that she gets her share.

The pecking order: even a half-bald, cartoonish excuse for a hen won’t relinquish her place in it.

Hen Chronicles: The molt nears an end . . . well, almost

This year’s molt is about 66 percent complete in our tiny flock. What I mean by that is two of our three hens -- Snow, a Plymouth Rock, and Hope, a Rhode Island Red -- are almost fully feathered once again. But our third chicken — Nellie, a Rhode Island Red — still has a long way to go before she finishes doffing her old feathers and donning new ones.

Nellie was the last of the three to molt this year, and she only began doing so about two weeks ago. As a result, she now looks like she was assembled from scratch by a half-blind taxidermist using spare parts.

In some spots, all of Nellie's old feathers remain intact. In other places, some outer-layer red feathers have dropped off to reveal cream-colored feathers underneath that contrast sharply with her normal rusty coloring. Nellie has bare spots too, and areas where new pin feathers are coming in.

If Nellie were a jigsaw puzzle, you might wonder why some of the pieces are missing, and why other pieces appear to have been borrowed from an entirely different puzzle.

Fortunately for her, it has not been especially cold of late.

I spoke with a woman yesterday morning who keeps chickens. She said most of her hens have stopped molting, or are about to do so. They’re eating more now, and their mood has improved. When they’re molting, she said, “they get very cranky.”

Don't I know it. I can't blame them, though. I'd be damn cranky too if it took me a month or more to change my clothes.

Hen Chronicles: Definitive proof that winter is upon us

Winter has arrived. Not officially, of course, but the most telling sign of all leaves no doubt. I’m not talking about chilly temperatures, or biting winds, or even the white stuff. No, I measure the change of seasons by something far more important.

Our hens have stopped laying.

Snow and Hope called it quits weeks ago, as soon as they began to molt in response to the days growing shorter. Nellie, our third hen, kept working long after the other hens gave up, laying an egg every other day until Nov. 21. Then she, too, stopped. Days later, she began dropping feathers, to make way for new ones.

It's a double whammy, really. Less daylight, in and of itself, means fewer eggs, or none at all. And molting, which usually occurs at this time of year, has the same effect, as hens divert their protein stores from producing eggs to creating feathers.

When our hens were younger, they laid all winter long, although less frequently than during the warmer months. Last winter, though, “the girls” simply stopped laying until the end of February, when an occasional egg finally began to materialize in the nest box. The pace picked up as the days grew longer and warmer.

It’s a proven fact that lighting a coop to create the illusion of longer days will trick hens into laying during the winter months (after the molt), but that strikes me as cruel, or at least unfair. Snow, Nellie and Hope have earned some down time. They seem more relaxed now that they’re on vacation. The rising and setting of the sun, not electrified trickery, dictates their behavior.

The other day, I was talking to a woman who kept chickens for a while but has stopped doing so. Among other things, she expressed frustration that her hens had been “freeloading” during the winter. They had to be fed, watered and cared for, yet they were not producing eggs, which struck this woman as a bad bargain.

I don’t see it that way at all. Even while on sabbatical, our hens remain beautiful and entertaining and full of life. Isn’t that enough?

Hen Chronicles: Baby, it's cold outside!

Humans are not the only creatures who must adapt, bit by bit, to the plummeting temperatures of the season. Chickens, too, must come to terms with the cold, one day at a time.

The thermometer on the deck read 20 degrees when I headed out to the coop at dawn. That’s not especially cold for late November in New England, but it is the coldest it’s been hereabouts so far this season.

In previous winters, Snow, Hope and Nellie have withstood readings south of 10 below without ill effects, so 20 above is positively balmy by comparison. But “the girls” didn’t see it that way this morning. Not all of them, anyway.

Top-of-the-pecking-order Snow bolted from the coop and into the pen as soon as I unlatched the door about 6:30 or so because she's voracious and breakfast awaited her outside. But Nellie, who usually emerges right on Snow’s tail feathers, or even ahead of her, remained on the roost with Hope. Even when I shook a container of scratch — a favorite cold-weather snack — in the open coop door to entice them, Nellie and Hope refused to budge.

The design of the coop is such that, if I lift the hinged roof and peek inside, I find myself at eye level with whoever is on the roost. So it was this morning, when Nellie and Hope peered out at me from their perch, wearing expressions that seemed to ask: “What? Already?”

They came out eventually, but it took additional coaxing. Still, there are small signs of progress. Instead of retreating into the coop as soon as they finished their breakfast, as they have been doing on cold mornings recently, “the girls” hung out in the pen, scratching and pecking and doing what chickens do when they aren’t preoccupied with warming up.

They aren’t ready for 12 below just yet. Me neither. But we're all headed in the right direction.

Hen Chronicles: A predictable routine, day in and day out

I like having the responsibility.

Almost every day for the last 3 1/2 years, I’ve walked, trudged (or shoveled) my way back to the chicken coop at dawn to release our hens, feed and water them, clean the coop and tell them what pretty birds they are.

Rain or shine, hot or cold, in sickness and in health, I’ve fulfilled my responsibility to “the girls" since we started with three hens in April 2012, except on those rare occasions when Liz and I were out of town.

Much has changed during that time. One member of the original trio of hens died in December 2012. The two survivors were joined by two newcomers in 2013. That boosted our total to four hens, until a death in June 2014 left us, once again, with three feathered musketeers, which remains the case now. Through it all, I've made the start-of-the-day trek to the back end of our city lot, where the coop sits tucked near a post-and-rail fence.

I walk our two dogs first thing as well, but ushering in a new day for the hens feels different. For years, Liz took the dogs on their early-morning walks, but greeting the hens always has been my responsibility. It’s woven into the fabric of my day. And it makes me content. Sometimes, even joyful. It's pleasant, and pleasantly predictable. (At least when all of the hens are healthy, which is the case most of the time.)

When I return to the house after each such excursion, whether in the heat of July or as the snow flies in February, Liz always asks the same question, in the same way. "How are the girls?" I give her a brief report, usually of a positive nature, sometimes including a humorous anecdote about the chickens' antics. Thus fortified, we are prepared to tackle the day.

Hen Chronicles: A small pleasure in a small package

Life is full of countless small pleasures, but few are more enjoyable than retrieving a freshly laid egg from a bed of pine shavings. Unless, of course, the egg is so fresh that it’s still warm. That is even more gratifying, especially on a cold, blustery day when winter is just around the corner.

I realize the science of egg production, the biology of it, has been well-studied and is thoroughly understood. And yet there is something magical in the fact that a hen can produce such a perfect little gem, not once, but over and over and over again, several times a week when conditions are right, for years on end. A laying hen is more productive, more beneficial to the world at large, in a year than many people are in a lifetime.

Hen Chronicles: The early arrival of the dreaded white stuff

The first snow of the season fell overnight here in central Maine. It was barely more than a dusting, but enough snow materialized to lightly blanket the ground, which was a bit disconcerting.

Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to check the weather forecast yesterday afternoon, after which I covered the chickens' pen with a tarp, to prevent snow from accumulating inside. On those rare occasions when I've accidentally allowed snow to fall in the pen, "the girls" have stood frozen at the coop door, peering out at the foreign landscape as if they had been relocated to Chernobyl. Eventually, hunger won out over fear in those cases, and the hens tentatively descended the ramp into the pen. They then tried to somehow reach the food bowl without actually stepping in the dreaded mystery substance that coated the soil.

I've seen plenty of pictures online of brave hens with an exploratory frame of mind traipsing through several inches of snow, with seeming indifference. Either the world is full of chickens who are much more flexible and adventuresome than our trio, or there are lots of chicken owners out there who should put their Photoshopping skills to better use.

Hen Chronicles: Trying to fathom the chicken mind

If you try to view the world from the perspective of chickens, much of what they do makes perfect sense. They become exuberant when someone approaches them with treats, for example, and fearful when they spot a bird of prey overhead. If I walk out to the coop when it starts to rain, they run out into the pen because they know I'm about to cover it with a tarp.

But sometimes their actions seem inexplicable, at least to a mere human such as myself.

I’ve mentioned here before that Nellie, one of our Rhode Island Reds, broke with tradition for three nights running last week when she tried to sleep in the nest box, rather than on the roost with the other hens. When I finally blocked access to the nest box last Saturday, Nellie moved back to the roost. Since then, she has freely chosen the roost every night, even though the nest box has been unobstructed since my initial decision to close it off for one night.

So a few questions arise. Why did Nellie move to the nest box in the first place? She wasn’t unable to reach the roost because of an injury. There’s no sign she was trying to avoid Snow or Hope because of a fight. And even though chickens have very poor nighttime vision, it’s hard to believe she couldn’t spot the roost in the darkened coop three nights in a row. Did she decide the nest box was more cozy than the roost? Or that she owns the nest box because she's the only hen who's laying these days? Maybe. But if so, why is she no longer sleeping there?

Perhaps the answers are to be found in yet another question. Is it possible that chickens are just as fickle as, well, humans?

Hen Chronicles: The remarkable diversity of Aves

As members of the class of animals known as Aves, birds are “warm-blooded vertebrates distinguished by having the body more or less completely covered with feathers and the forelimbs modified as wings,” according to merriam-webster.com.

And there the similarity ends. In many cases, anyway.

There are an estimated 9,000 species of birds worldwide, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology, so it’s not surprising that they take many forms. Once you look beyond such commonalities as beaks, feathers and egg laying, birds vary dramatically, as any child can tell you. Heck, some of them can’t even do the one thing we most associate with birds: fly.

But let’s put penguins aside for the moment. It only took a trip into my backyard the other day to illustrate, on a small scale, the variations that exist among birds.

As I was walking through the yard, I heard, and then saw, a woodpecker pecking away at our elderberry plant, which is located some distance from the chicken coop. Thanks to where I was standing at the time, I could see the woodpecker in the foreground and our three hens in the background, watching me from the front of their pen to determine whether I was headed their way with snacks.

If I had been armed with a camera, the woodpecker and the hens would have been in the same shot, except that either the woodpecker or the hens would have been at least slightly out of focus, because of the distance that separated them. To my eye, though, both foreground and background were in sharp focus.

That’s what made the contrast between the hens and the woodpecker so telling. When seen in the same visual “frame,” the hens obviously were much larger than the woodpecker. The chickens and the woodpecker did not share the same coloring or shape or behavior or general characteristics. They were not remotely similar in appearance. And yet the hens — like the woodpecker and the chickadee and the crow and the owl and the eagle and the vulture and the hummingbird and the ostrich and the puffin and the peacock — belong to the same class of animals.

What a remarkable diversity of life we have on this planet. Perhaps we would appreciate it more, as a species, if humans weren’t so homocentric. Even our own class, Mammalia, contains more than 5,000 species. We’re just one animal among many, many others.

Hen Chronicles: Nellie is playing by the rules once again

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.

Hen Chronicles: Putting Rhode Island Red Nellie to bed

Nellie pulled another of her bedtime stunts earlier this week by trying to settle down in the nest box for the night instead of hopping up onto the roost with her coop mates, Snow and Hope.

Normally, all three hens sleep side by side on the roost, but Nellie has gone solo before. Other chicken owners report in online forums that their hens have done the same thing as well, for no obvious reason. (At least no reason that is obvious to humans.) Initially, my theory was that Nellie stayed outside until it was too dark to find her way up to the roost, but she's headed for the nest box three nights in a row now, so there must be some other explanation. Perhaps the nest box, with its soft bed of pine shavings, is just more comfortable.

Whatever the cause of Nellie’s nocturnal detours, Liz and I decided to place her where she belonged that first night -- or at least where we thought she belonged. Lifting Nellie from the nest box while I held a flashlight, Liz carried her to the roost. Nellie did not cooperate; she kept her feet tucked up under her body. Eventually, though, she dropped her toes into position, took hold of the perch and called it a night.

“I guess she just didn’t want to lower her landing gear,” Liz said as we headed back to the house.

Hen Chronicles: Mastering the molt?

Liz and I love all three of our hens, but Hope, a Rhode Island Red, is the only one of them who could accurately be described as sweet.

Hope is at the bottom of the pecking order. She’s the smallest member of the trio. She seems to be constantly on the alert for predators, real or imagined, and she’s the only one of our hens who routinely makes the high-pitched trilling sound of a frightened chicken. Hope is timid and shy, except when someone (i.e., me) is foolish enough to try to move her out of the nest box, a mistake I made only once. (I still recall the pain from the nasty peck she gave my hand that day, way back when.)

Not surprisingly, fearful, skittish Hope seems to take it especially hard when she starts to molt, as she is doing now. Dropping old feathers while new ones poke their way through your skin has to be uncomfortable, at  the very least, for any chicken. But Snow and Nellie, our other hens, take it pretty much in stride, going about their business as if there’s nothing remotely cartoonish about a chicken whose feathers fly off in her wake.

Hope has long been the last one to leave the coop in the morning, but since she started molting, she’s been reluctant to even get out of bed. For the last two weeks or so, while Snow and Nellie were in the pen pecking away at breakfast, I’ve had to nudge Hope by gently tapping her wing, just to get her off the roost and through the door. Once outside, she would hunker down, motionless, with her head pulled into her neck.

Until Monday.

Hope still needed some persuading to get up that morning, but she quickly abandoned her chicken-as-a-statue pose by walking around in the pen and nibbling at the feed. Then, on Tuesday, an even bigger breakthrough. For the first time in weeks, Hope got up on her own at dawn, and eagerly trotted down the ramp to the pen, right on the heels of Snow and Nellie. She even flapped her wings, which I interpret as a combination morning stretch and proclamation: “Here I am, world.”

Perhaps Hope is starting to come to terms with her latest change of clothing. She’s got quite a ways to go yet before the process is complete, but at least she’s off to a better start than she was in 2014. Last year, Hope did not even begin molting until mid January, so she was half-dressed during the coldest part of the winter.

Timing may not be everything, but when it comes to the molt, it counts for a lot. It may even provide — dare I say it? —hope for a sweet little hen who could use a break.

Hen Chronicles: To everything - turn, turn, turn

The off-season has arrived.

Shorter days mean fewer hours of daylight, and in our coop, which has no electric lights, that means a dramatic drop in egg production. Snow, Nellie and Hope laid a mere 20 eggs in October, compared to 45 in September, and that number is likely to fall even lower in the months ahead. If last winter is any indication, “the girls” may stop laying altogether for a spell.

I see this as part of the natural order of things, not as a problem requiring a solution. Lighting the coop to create the illusion of longer days is a proven way to keep hens laying. But our hens work hard during the spring and summer, so I figure they deserve a break during the cold-weather months, if they need one. That is, after all, how they are designed. Let them work — or not — according to the manufacturer’s specifications.

To deceive the hens with electrical chicanery reminds me of those TV spots from the 1970s in which Mother Nature, angry that she has been tricked into believing margarine is butter, unleashes thunder and lightning to accentuate her fearsome reprimand: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” (Never mind that Mother Nature was fooled. You get the idea.)

Anyway, even if I decided to light the coop, it wouldn’t do any good in the short term. Snow, our white Plymouth Rock, has been molting for about three weeks now, and continues to drop feathers every day as new ones grow in. Now Hope, one of our two Rhode Island Reds, has begun to molt as well. She’s smaller than she used to be, thanks to the temporary disappearance of her tail feathers. Every morning, the coop is littered with white and rust-colored feathers (in addition to the inevitable overnight deposits of you-know-what).

Feathers, like eggs, are largely comprised of protein and a hen only has enough of the stuff to tackle one task at a time. So a chicken that needs new feathers ASAP shifts gears, from crafting eggs to making a suit of clothes.

Shorter days and balding chickens. As the holidays draw ever closer, ’tis the season for many things. But homegrown eggs may not be among them.

Hen Chronicles: A stranger sums up my take on chickens

I was shopping for chicken supplies at our local Tractor Supply Co. outlet the other day when the cashier and I got to talking about her hens.

“Well,” she said at last, “I can see by what your buying that yours are spoiled.”

“Yes,” I replied. “We think of them as pets.”

The sturdy-looking, middle-aged woman, who struck me as more farmer than hobbyist, paused for a second or two with a bemused look on her face.

“Oh,” she said finally, as if a revelation had just dawned. “So the eggs are just a bonus!”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

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.