Hen Chronicles: Laying is Job One, even during coop cleanup

I dread giving the chicken coop a thorough cleaning, which I do twice a year, but not because it’s a dusty, wet, messy job. I clean four cats' litter boxes and scoop poop from the coop every morning, so I'm no stranger to messy jobs.

The thing is, I just hate having to lock our three hens outside while I remove all of the bedding from the coop, scrape off any fossilized deposits, scrub the floor and spray the interior walls with a water-and-vinegar solution, wipe the floor with rags to remove any excess liquid, and then wait for everything to dry out before adding fresh bedding and reopening the coop. But like it or not, yesterday was the day. The whole shebang took a good 90 minutes or more from start to finish.

Snow, Nellie and Hope did not approve of this ritual. They never do, partly because they aren't big fans of change. And if they're ready to lay while the coop is temporarily closed to all traffic, they can’t get to their nest boxes, which are in the coop. That means they have to “hold it,” which I believe they can do for a short while, or drop their cargo outside, in the pen or under the raised coop.

Either way, once the coop has been reopened, I have to stage a one-man egg hunt outside, to find out if any of the hens was desperate enough to embrace a change in venue while the nest boxes were off-limits. I came up empty-handed during yesterday’s search, which was a good thing. In the past, the hens have been known to lay in inaccessible spots when denied access to their boxes, forcing me to jury-rig a retrieval gizmo that lets me reach and role a wayward egg without breaking it.

Trust me. That's easier said than done. We're not talking hard-boiled eggs here.

Hen Chronicles: Getting ready for winter with a coop cleanup

The pre-winter coop cleaning was delayed this year, thanks to a prodigious amount of procrastinating on my part. But I finally got around to it on Wednesday, which offered the warm, sunny conditions that are ideal for a task I normally tackle in September. (I remove the nightly "deposits" from the coop daily at dawn, but the job at hand involved one of my thorough, twice-yearly cleansings.)

Gathering all my gear — a large blue bucket to collect the used bedding, a pail and squirt bottle containing a vinegar-and-water solution, disposable gloves, rags, and assorted brushes and scraping implements (for any encrusted poop), I headed out to the coop shortly before 11:30 yesterday morning.

Not surprisingly, “the girls” were not immediately cooperative. Snow already was outside in the pen, where the hens have to wait things out while I empty and clean the coop before laying in fresh bedding. But Nellie and Hope were ensconced in the coop, where they don’t usually hang out during the day unless they plan to lay their eggs.

So I trudged back into the house and waited half an hour before trying again. This time, Snow and Hope were in the pen, but Nellie was in the coop's nest box. Dandelion greens, a favorite treat, did not lure her out, so I gave her a gentle nudge, which did the trick. If she had been planning on laying, neither she nor anyone else had gotten around to it yet, as there were no eggs to be found.

I locked all three hens out in the pen anyway, risking the possibility that eggs might turn up in hard to reach places while the hens were stuck outside. (It didn’t happen.)

The cleaning itself took about 30 minutes. But scrubbing the wooden floor with that vinegar-and-water solution left it damp, so I let the coop dry out for quite some time before filling it with fresh pine shavings. Only then, after more than an hour in exile, could Snow, Nellie and Hope go back in.

And that’s just what they did. Immediately, amid great anticipation. (If you think cats are curious, try watching chickens in action.) All three hens raced into the coop and poked around with considerable enthusiasm. Within minutes, Nellie had deposited an egg in the nest box. All was right in their world.

I would love to know, though, if “the girls" appreciate having their digs spruced up, spring and fall, or if they see it as needless interior decorating by their pesky landlord.

Hen Chronicles: Separation anxiety . . . the chicken edition

I don’t know why I procrastinated as long as I did. But last weekend, it finally caught up with me. “The girls” were not amused. And neither was I.

Every year, Liz and I pull the pen away from our coop, so I can rake the ground within the pen and level it off. This is part of a larger ritual which involves raising the coop and the pen an inch or more, to compensate for the fact that, in the spring, melting snow and heavy rains cause coop and pen to sink into the ground a bit. If I leave them down there, the wood might rot that much faster.

But first things first. Before we could do any lifting or moving or raking or shoveling or elevating or adjusting, Snow, Nellie and Hope had to be relocated to a backup pen. A bit of coaxing with mealworm was enough to lure Snow and Nellie within reach, and Liz carted them off to their home away from home.

But Hope refused to budge. Tasty treats, sweet talk from Liz, scowls and grumbling from yours truly, all manner of cajoling . . . none of it worked. Hope parked herself in the open area under the coop and refused to come out, no matter what we said or did, even when I threatened to turn her into an entrée. (Don’t worry; I made that last part up.)

I won’t bore you with the step-by-step details of our project. Suffice it to say it took longer than expected, and was more complicated than it should have been, because we had to work around Hope, all the while praying that she would not bolt from under the coop and take off across the yard toward one of three nearby streets.

She didn’t. But that’s not the most interesting part of this little saga. As unhappy as Hope was, things were not going well in the backup pen either. We had placed that pen on a recently harvested garden bed, which was full of weeds and worms and bugs and God knows what else. It was chicken heaven, ripe for scratching and pecking. Or it should have been. Instead, Nellie stood at the front of her temporary home, uttering the chicken equivalent of a plaintive wail.

She wasn’t sick. She just wanted to be with Hope.

If two chickens can be soul mates, Nellie and Hope fit the bill. And why wouldn’t they? As pullets back in 2013, they traveled halfway across the country together in a cardboard box, when a hatchery in the Midwest shipped them to us via USPS. They were too young to have combs or wattles and were still chirping like chicks when I picked them up at the post office here in Augusta, Maine.

These two musketeers have lived together ever since. Nellie and Hope have bonded. They’re buddies. Remove one of them from the mix and the calculus is off. Sure, they missed Snow when she had to be isolated last fall while recovering from a head wound, but not as much as they missed each other last Sunday.

Eventually, the hens were reunited in their old, familiar digs. And once that happened, all was right in their world because their “family” remained intact. Would that our human problems could be solved so easily.

Left to right: Nellie, Hope and Snow at home last summer 

Hen Chronicles: Keeping chickens isn't a résumé builder

You learn lots of things by owning chickens. That’s the upside. The downside? Most of it is stuff that is of no use whatsoever in any other context.

Take dealing with chicken wire, for example. Our wood-framed pen is covered in the stuff, and I noticed recently that the wire had become loose on the front of the pen. It wasn't detached  — just slack. The wire had stretched. It wasn’t taut anymore.

What to do? The wire is stapled to the front of the pen in such a way that I’d have to disassemble part of the pen to remove and reattach it. That’s not an attractive prospect. But I found an easier solution. Using needle-nose pliers, I gave a piece of wire a slight turn, which tightened it. By doing this over and over again more than a dozen times across the front of the pen, the whole enclosure ended up nice and snug. No muss, no fuss.

That’s not exactly a skill that would look great on a résumé, but it scored high on the chicken entertainment scale. Snow, Nellie and Hope all lined up, side by side, at the front of the pen and watched in rapt attention as I tackled the job, as if they were supervising my progress.

All three of the normally talkative hens were quiet for a change. Perhaps they were confused -- or intrigued -- by the fact that needle-nose pliers in action vaguely resemble . . . a chicken’s beak!
  

Hen Chronicles: Old MacDonald had a coop, E-I-E-I-O

If anyone had told me five years ago that, at 6 a.m. on June 28, 2014, I’d be on my knees in the mud nailing tacks into a loose stretch of chicken wire while eye-to-eye with a furious hen who was squawking her brains out because I had the audacity to show up on her turf without treats, I would have told him to lay off the sauce.

Hen Chronicles: It's getting a bit damp out there

Can chickens swim? The question came to mind a few days ago when we had two days of extremely heavy rain here in central Maine, followed by several days of intermittent showers.

The backyard coop shared by our three hens was never in any danger of flooding because it’s elevated. But the adjacent pen rests on the ground, and at the rate the rain was falling, it was only a matter of time before the encroaching waters that had flooded portions of the yard would pour into the pen as well.

For whatever reason, the hens refuse to go into their high and dry coop during the day, except to lay their eggs, yet a pool of water had developed right outside the pen. The ground was too saturated to absorb the water, which quickly edged its way to the frame of the pen as the pool grew larger and deeper. I faced the prospect of watching the pen turn into a poultry swimming hole.

Applying my rudimentary engineering skills ("nonexistent" would be a better word), I decided that dropping a large pile of newspapers into the pool, and covering them with buckets to collect some of the rainwater, would dry things up.

And it did. Briefly. The newspapers soaked up all of the standing water, and the buckets filled with rainwater. As the downpour continued, though, the sodden newspapers outlived their usefulness and the buckets proved that they were not up to the task. The pool reemerged.

Time for Plan B.

I knew from my past experience using wood chips around our raised garden beds that they are very absorbent, so I figured that would work in this case too. Problem: no wood chips on hand. Normally, I pick them up for free at the local landfill, but this being a Sunday, that was not an option.

We have two big-box home-improvement stores here in Augusta, but the first one that I visited didn’t carry wood chips - topsoil, compost, mulch, all manner of gravel and small rocks - but no wood chips.

As I tried to cook up a Plan C, I raced to the second big-box store, which had pine bark nuggets in stock. Not exactly what I had in mind, but close enough. I bought three large bags of the stuff, drove home, and dumped two full bags of nuggets into the standing water that was lapping at the pen.

Success!

By now, though, rainwater had begun dripping off the edge of the tarp that covered the pen. Actually, “dripping” is an understatement. This was a constant stream of water, like you’d get if you turned the kitchen faucet on just a bit.

Amazingly, the water was trickling off the tarp in only one location, so placing a large bucket in the right spot did the trick. I had to empty the bucket every few hours, but that was far better than the alternative.

The end result is that the pen became muddy, but it did not flood. The hens mucked around in the mud until bedtime, when they trooped into their toasty coop, with its metal roof and piles of dry, clean wood shavings on the floor. They obviously did some preening and grooming before nodding off, because they looked as good as new the following morning.

So can chickens swim? I’ve read that they can (even though their feet are not webbed), but I didn’t have to put that theory to the test. Which was fine by me, because I've yet to find any chicken-sized lifejackets.