Hen Chronicles: Recalling the old days

It’s been more than 13 years now since we started keeping chickens at the far end of our backyard here in Augusta, Maine, and almost six years since we stopped doing so, in November 2019.

Keeping chickens was fun, but also frustrating. From time to time, we had an assortment of problems with one hen or another, which goes with the territory. In our experience, chickens are hardy (in terms of coping with the weather, for example) but delicate as well.

A hen might become sick or die unexpectedly; or an egg would become “bound,” preventing a hen from laying it until we intervened; or pesky mites would turn up in the coop; or part of a hen’s oviduct would turn inside out and protrude from her body, forcing us to push it back into place. (Yes, that’s a thing.) We coped with several types of problems over the years, usually successfully, but sometimes not. My wife and I are not veterinarians, after all. And even our wonderful, chicken-owning vets could not work miracles.

Yet despite all of the heartache and stress that a backyard flock can cause, I still miss our “girls” all these years later. I remember all of their names. Their distinctive personalities and antics still bring a smile to my face. And I recall, without checking records, the year in which each of them passed on.

I don’t regret our decision to “fly the coop,” so to speak. It was time. But I do have fond memories of what was. That’s especially true when I catch a glimpse of the bare spot in our yard that once held a coop, a pen, and a small flock of beautiful, bouncing, squawking, wing-flapping, snack-loving comics.

Hen Chronicles: Who let the chicken cross the road?

Several times in the last few years, while I was driving on a rural road in a nearby town, chickens crossed the street right in front of me, always at the same location. While I waited patiently, they meandered by ever so slowly, obviously unperturbed by the sight of a stopped car mere feet from them. (No, I never ran over any of them because I learned where to anticipate them, and slowed down accordingly.)

I assume the owners of these chickens no longer have them or have smartened up about caring for them, because I don’t see free-ranging hens on that road anymore. Did these folks lose one too many chickens to one too many speed demons, so they got rid of their flock? Or did they do the sensible thing and decide to shield their chickens from passing traffic? Back when we had chickens, in the 2010s, they were confined to a coop and an attached pen. The coop and pen were relatively small, but large enough for the few chickens we had. They were comfortable and happy there. They laid plenty of eggs. Most importantly, they were safe.

Keeping backyard chickens remains a popular pastime, as I was reminded recently when my wife and I drove down a narrow street in a congested section of our city. Liz nearly shrieked when she caught sight of chickens and ducks walking along the edge of the street. Sure enough, when I glanced at the rearview mirror I saw a chicken, closely followed by a duck!

What is it that causes some people to be irresponsible with their animals? Whether it’s loose poultry, unleashed dogs that are not under voice control, or outdoor cats (which can kill birds or be killed themselves), the risks are obvious. Or should be. Of course, all sorts of people have all sorts of bad habits involving all sorts of things. It’s unfortunate that, sometimes, those habits victimize innocent animals who deserve better.

They're known as backyard chickens for a reason.

 

Hen Chronicles: Saying goodbye

It’s been quite an adventure, full of joy and mishap, wonder and heartache, contentment and aggravation.

And now it’s over.

After we joined the ranks of backyard chicken keepers back in April 2012, our tiny flock shrunk and grew and shrunk again, eventually leaving us with Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds.

Hope, who had been ill for some time, died overnight Friday or Saturday. I found her in the coop at dawn Saturday, when I went out to feed "the girls." Nellie, who always talked up a storm when she saw or heard me approach with breakfast, sat silently beside Hope’s body. For reasons which I don't need to go into, we eventually decided in the difficult hours following Hope’s death that we could not keep or save Nellie, who was euthanized later that day.

The coop is empty.

My wife Liz and I learned a lot about chickens during this chapter in our lives, but we always strove to learn more about this underappreciated species. It was an educational journey that continued until the end. We loved our hens and cherished their company, even when one or another of them slashed her comb in a freak accident that splattered blood all over the place, or became egg bound, or suffered a prolapsed oviduct (don't ask!), or grew a rooster-like leg spur that had to be filed down weekly, or needed to have a beak trimmed or a toenail clipped or a fanny washed.

We enjoyed their antics. We took pleasure in their chatter. We marveled at their beauty and intelligence, the uniqueness of their personalities, the complexity of their relationships, the mysteries of their physiology, and their ability to do something as simply magical as laying an egg.

And over the years, we grieved their loss.

Snow and Nala and Stella, our original threesome, have been gone for some time. And now Nellie and Hope, who joined us as pullets in May 2013 when they arrived together in a cardboard box via USPS, are gone as well. As Thanksgiving draws near, we are very grateful to have shared all of their lives.

Hen Chronicles: Creature discomforts

Our dogs —  Aquinnah, a chocolate lab, and Martha, a pit bull mix — have no direct contact with our chickens, but the two species are well aware of one another. The coop is located at the back end of our relatively large city lot, and in the winter, when it’s often impractical to take the dogs for longer walks, they sometimes make a circuit in the yard that takes them behind the coop.

The fascinating aspect of this, at least to me, is how the animals involved react differently to such close encounters of the critter kind.

At 85-pounds, Aquinnah (aka, Quinn) probably looks quite intimidating to our two Rhode Island Reds, Nellie and Hope. And it doesn’t help matters that Quinn, who is leashed, always tries to lunge toward the hens whenever he gets within a few feet of their housing. Invariably, the hens react to these attempted incursions by running up the ramp that leads from the pen to the coop, often with a flapping of wings to give them a bit more propulsion.

It’s another story entirely when Martha makes her rounds. For one thing, she only weights about 40 pounds, maybe less. More importantly, she shows no aggression toward the hens, and only the slightest interest in them. Not surprisingly, then, Nellie and Hope are equally indifferent to her presence in their neighborhood, and go about their business without any of the Chicken Little antics they display when Quinn’s around.

I’ve seen plenty of photos of dogs guarding free-range chickens in what appears to be a perfectly peaceful arrangement. I suppose Martha could have been trained to perform such a role, if our hens were allowed to run free in the partially fenced yard. Quinn, on the other hand, probably would have been stripped of his badge on his first day of work after jumping in to try for a quick snack, policing responsibilities be damned.

Hen Chronicles: Special greetings, but only once a year

I’m reasonably sure that chickens do not celebrate Christmas, either in the religious sense or in terms of rampant consumerism. (After all, they have no cash and no credit cards.) But our small corner of the world was so hushed when I went out to feed our two Rhode Island Reds at dawn, so tranquil and serene, that the long walk along the winding path from the garage to the coop at the back of our lot seemed almost magical.

Day in and day out, in the warmth of July and the snows of February, I always say good morning to "the girls" when they emerge from the coop first thing in the morning. But today, when each of the hens headed down the ramp and into the pen, I wished Nellie, and then Hope, a Merry Christmas. Somehow, it seemed fitting, even while talking to the humblest among us.

Hen Chronicles: Yes, even chickens are sentient creatures

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines sentient as responsive to or conscious of sense impressions; aware; finely sensitive in perception or feeling.

The first definition — recognizing information provided by the senses — obviously applies to chickens as well as to other species, including our own. So too the second definition. Chickens have excellent eyesight, for example, and they respond to the voices of people they know.

But does that third definition fit? Are chickens “finely sensitive in perception or feeling”?

Last week, Nellie, one of our two Rhode Island Red hens, was under the weather. She was lethargic on Monday and her appetite was off. The same was true the next day, and her behavior was sufficiently worrisome that I called a veterinarian to have Nellie checked out.

As it happened, the vet, whom we had consulted about our chickens in the past, could not see Nellie until Friday, so I made arrangements to bring her in then. By Wednesday, though, Nellie had improved, and she continued to do so on Thursday. I canceled the appointment, and am glad to report that, as of this morning, Nellie is behaving normally.

So what does all this have to do with the sentience of chickens? Here’s the thing. While she was unwell, Nellie spent quite a bit of time sitting around, in the coop or outside, in the pen. She moved from time to time, only to plant herself in a different spot. And through it all, whenever I went out to check on the patient, Hope, the other Rhode Island Red, was right by her side. Wherever Nellie chose to sit, Hope stayed with her, sentinel-like, always standing as close to the seated Nellie as she could get. Hope clearly saw that Nellie was behaving abnormally, and that fact concerned her.

So although I don’t claim to know if chickens are “finely sensitive,” clearly they are “sensitive in perception or feeling” to some degree and in some fashion. More so, I dare say, than many humans.

Hen Chronicles: Feeding chickens at the break of dawn is fun?

Every morning since April 2012, except when I've been out of town, I’ve headed out at dawn to feed and water our chickens. During those six-plus years, our tiny flock has fluctuated in size from four hens to, currently, two.

The last of our three original hens died last year. At the moment, we’re left with Nellie and Hope, Rhode Island Reds that hatched in January 2013. Four months later, we bought them from a hatchery in the midwest, which shipped them out to us — together — via USPS.

Tending to “the girls” first thing in the morning is easier, say, in May than in February. But I like doing it even on the coldest, snowiest Maine mornings. There are several aspects of this routine that I find satisfying, including its predictable regularity, which is immune to whatever fresh hell fills the headlines every day.

I enjoy seeing the hens bounce around impatiently at their coop’s east-side window if they’re already up when I arrive on the scene. If I show up early, I hear them jump down from the roost to the coop floor, where they land with a heavy, reassuring thud.

I enjoy unlatching the coop door and wishing “the girls” a good morning as they emerge from the coop and head down the ramp into the pen. Nellie almost always comes out first, followed, eventually, by sleepyhead Hope. I rub my hand along each hen’s soft, feathered back as she emerges. Nellie likes this just fine; Hope, not so much.

I enjoy watching the hens dig into their feed, usually with ravenous fervor, as soon as they get down to the pen. I especially like seeing Nellie and Hope, who get along very well, chowing down side by side at their bowl when they aren’t pecking at the handful of pellets that I’ve scattered on the ground.

I enjoy the chickens’ varied vocalizations. (Ornithologists have identified more than two dozen distinct chicken calls.) There's the plaintive sound they make when they think I’m taking too long to release them from the coop, the happy cluck-cluck once they’re outside, and the high-pitched chirping with which they great an unexpected treat. The hens utter an apprehensive warning when they spot a bird of prey high overhead, or a neighborhood cat that has wandered too close for their liking.

And I enjoy squatting down to watch “the girls” for a few minutes (even in winter), studying their mannerisms and the patterned beauty of their wing feathers. That’s when I remind myself that although chickens lack the aerial gymnastics of a hummingbird, or the nobility of an eagle, or the predatory skills of a hawk, or the melodious song of a wren, they are lovely, intelligent, individualistic creatures in their own right, not some “lowly” species in the constellation of birds.

Every day at dawn, I get to hang out with the closest living relative of the T. rex. How cool is that?

Hen Chronicles: A special bond between two hens?

When my wife wife Liz and I spot either of our two hens in the position “modeled” at left (by a chicken I found on Google), we joke that the hen in question is in “tea cozy mode,” because the posture conjures up images of a teapot cover.

Our Rhode Island Reds, Nellie and Hope, frequently sit like this in their pen and sometimes in the coop, especially on pleasant days that are sunny but not especially hot or humid. It seems to be a relaxed pose, suggesting that the hen is calm and content.

But until this morning, I don’t think I’d ever seen our “girls’ in precisely the same configuration that greeted me when I went outside to do some yard work. Nellie and Hope were both “doing a tea cozy” at the same time, which is not unusual. What caught my eye is that I saw them in profile, sitting face-to-face, completely immobile with their beaks a mere inch or so apart.

I didn’t bother running into the house to grab my camera because I knew “the girls,” who believe humans exist for the sole purpose of feeding them, would jump up expecting a snack as soon as I got close enough to get a shot of them. You’ll have to take my word for it that they looked for all the world like something off the front of a greeting card designed to celebrate friendship.

Whether chickens are capable of love is anybody’s guess. But they certainly can be affectionate, as our duo made clear today. These two routinely sleep wing to wing, even in the warmest weather. Here's a possible explanation. At one time, Nellie and Hope were part of a flock of four hens, but a death in 2015, and another last year, has left them alone with one another. Perhaps that has created a special bond between them.

Hen Chronicles: Finding a bit of tranquility in troubled times

We live in troubled times. Sickening creatures roam the halls of the White House, led by an ignorant man-child who has access to the launch codes. Congress is a confederacy of dunces. Gloomy pundits prognosticate about the fate of our republic. In The Washington Post today, columnist Kathleen Parker asks: “Who can save us from ourselves?”

But at 5:40 this morning, routine mollified me. Heading out to the garage, I filled the chickens’ feed and water bowls, donned a disposable glove, grabbed the poop bucket, and headed out to the back of our lot. As I have done every day at dawn since April 2012.

“The girls” were still “in bed” on their roost in the coop when I got there, but they heard my arrival. One by one, they hopped down to the floor and gathered at the door, clucking quietly as they waited for me to release them into the pen. After I cleaned out the coop, I watched Snow, Nellie and Hope peck away at their food. Despite the language barrier, we exchanged pleasantries before I returned to the house.

Routine is a blessing. Caring for the hens is therapeutic, clearing the mind of dark thoughts, at least for a few minutes. Three animated bundles of feathers provide a daily dose of tranquility in this, our frightening era.

Hen Chronicles: Yes, chickens can fly . . . of a fashion

While visiting a small farm in southern Maine years ago, I saw a chicken fly into a tree. It landed on a branch that was at least eight feet off the ground, possibly higher.

We didn’t have hens back then, so I knew little about them. I simply assumed, based on what I observed that day, that free-range chickens often perch in trees when they want a change of perspective. Now, after five years of keeping chickens, observing their habits and researching them, I’ve come to a different conclusion.

Yes, chickens can fly. But they aren’t very good at it. In fact, flight is such a relatively minor part of a chicken’s life that two of the three reference books I consulted while writing this make no mention of it. Gail Damerow’s excellent The Chicken Encyclopedia does, but the entry is understandably brief. In defining what a wing is, Damerow writes that it's a "feathered appendage corresponding to a human arm, a pair of which enables a chicken to fly short distances but is more commonly used for balance during such activities as running or jumping down from a roost."

In other words, a chicken’s wings keep it from falling down more often than they help it to fly up.

I got to thinking about this one morning recently when two of our three hens — Rhode Island Reds Nellie and Hope — flapped their wings quite vigorously while in their pen, shortly after I released them from the coop. The hens were not trying to fly; they know the pen is covered. But this is something “the girls” do quite often first thing in the morning, apparently in much the same way that some people stretch while getting up from bed.
 
Observing such “wing flaps,” as I call them, shows why flight is not a chicken’s strong suit. Chickens are relatively large birds, but they have short wings in proportion to their size. For example, an adult Rhode Island Red typically weighs a lot more than a red-tailed hawk, but the hawk has an average wing span of four feet. And the chicken? Two feet or less, according to one online source. On those rare occasions when our hens try to make a break for it, they zigzag through the yard like windup toys, running frantically while making no attempt to take flight.

Chickens are beautiful creatures. They're intelligent. Remarkable, even. But aerodynamic? Let's just say it's a good thing they don't have to fly south before winter sets in.

Hen Chronicles: This may be the best way to start a new day

As soon as I rounded the corner of the garage at dawn today, I saw our hen Snow off in the distance, bobbing up and down in the window at the front of the coop, eagerly awaiting my arrival with breakfast. Moments later, as I headed down the path that leads to the coop, Snow's squawking, and the softer clucking of coopmates Nellie and Hope, showed that impatience was on the rise.

It was 20 degrees outside, which, to the winter-hardy chickens, is a veritable heat wave. As soon as I unlatched the door, "the girls" bounded down the ramp and into the pen, where they dug into their meal with obvious glee. Chickens do not greet the new day with a grumpy yawn. They embrace it with unbridled enthusiasm. We should take notice.

Hen Chronicles: Reunited with "the girls" after a week away

When Liz and I and our two dogs headed to the Maine coast for a week-long vacation last Saturday, we willingly left the care of our three hens (and cats and tropical fish) to Seth, a local man who has looked after the chickens before. He is responsible, and although he seems to be more fond of cats than hens (?), we knew furry, feathered and finned critters alike were in good hands. So I didn't spend much time worrying about Snow, Nellie and Hope during the course of our stay in the tiny seaside town of Searsport, although I did think about them from time to time. 

After we returned home late yesterday morning, I gave the hens a snack, for the first time in a week. Last night, I got back into the habit of locking them in their coop. Then, as dawn broke this morning to reveal a cool and misty day, I gathered my supplies, headed out to the coop, and unlatched the door, releasing "the girls" into their pen. I stroked each hen on her back as she headed down the ramp, and wished each of them a good morning, by name.

It wasn't at all like the novelty of gazing out at the waters of Penobscot Bay from the tall windows of our Searsport rental's living room. But normalcy has its own rewards.

Hen Chronicles: Henry Beston's "mystical concept of animals"

I’ve always loved the late naturalist Henry Beston’s oft-quoted claim, as stated in The Outermost House, that animals are "other nations." It’s applicable to all species, of course, but when it comes to our little menagerie, for some reason I associate it more with our chickens than with our dogs and cats.

In part, that’s because the three hens, living as they do by themselves in their coop at the far end of our lot, seem a bit more independent, a tad more "other," than the two dogs and four cats who share our home and are always underfoot. After all, Snow, Nellie and Hope have their own place, their own henhouse.

Chickens are, of course, domestic animals. Like us, they are vertebrates. But unlike dogs, cats and other Mammalia, chickens are birds. They can fly (though not very well). They do not give birth to live young. (Chicks are not born until they hatch.) Chickens are feathered, beaked, winged, toothless, egg-laying creatures of the Aves class that are more alien in appearance, habits and biology than the furry, four-legged companions who hog the couch, commandeer the bed and hover near the table at dinnertime.

Cats and dogs have cousins in the wild, but only the supposedly "lowly" chicken can claim to be the closest living relative of the legendary T. rex. (Really! Look it up.) That certainly earns these underappreciated latter-day dinosaurs a place of honor among the “other nations” to which Beston (1888-1968) refers in the following passage from The Outermost House, which was published in 1928.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Hen Chronicles: Do chickens believe humans are omnipotent?

We had heavy rain and high winds here in central Maine last Thursday. The weather was so bad that I completely covered the pen with tarps, so the ground would not get soaked and “the girls” could still venture outside (of a fashion).

By the time I got out to the coop first thing Friday morning, the storm had passed. Before I removed the tarps, though, I unlatched the coop door. Eager for their breakfast, Snow, Nellie and Hope emerged into the darkness of the pen, which the sun could not penetrate because of the tarps.

As the hens chowed down, I got to work. First, the south-side tarp came off. A wan bit of daylight seeped into the pen. Then I removed the west-side tarp. The pen grew somewhat brighter. Once the east-side tarp was gone, still more light flooded the enclosure. Finally, I yanked the last tarp off the top of the pen, fully exposing it to the new day.

I wonder if the hens, while watching this gradual introduction of light to their world, asked themselves: “Are these humans so all-powerful that they control the very sun?”

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 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: 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: Who's really calling the shots around here?

The beauties from our backyard that are pictured below ripened last week, before overnight temperatures plummeted to the 20s. I picked almost all of these raspberries Saturday and Sunday, but instead of savoring them myself, as one last rite of a summer that already feels like a time long gone, I gave them to our three hens.

Snow, Nellie and Hope gobbled them down with the gusto they always display whenever berries come their way. But the fact that they, not I, got this late-season snack raises an obvious question that I've asked myself time and time again in recent years: Who's really in charge here? Me? Or the chickens? I'm afraid to spend too long contemplating this, for fear of the answer.

Hen Chronicles: The pleasures of the quotidian

We often associate the word “ritual” with religious practices, but a broader definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary describes it as something that is “always done in a particular situation and in the same way each time.”

Brewing a pot of coffee each morning is a ritual. So is sitting down with a mug of tea and a book every night. Ritual is an integral part of life. Never is that more true, for me, than when I release our three hens from their coop at the dawn of each new day.

As night is about to relinquish its hold on the world, I head out to the garage to get things ready. Feed. Water. A disposable glove and a bucket, for poop removal. Maybe some crushed oyster shells, which chickens willingly eat from time to time when they need extra calcium.

The route from the garage to the coop takes me along a winding, stone-bordered path. Walking on the wood chips that cover the path creates a sense of anticipation as I look forward to greeting Snow, Nellie and Hope once again.

The trip isn’t always idyllic. Sometimes it’s pouring. During the winter months, I may have to shovel my way out there, or brave the bitter cold. But on a dry day at this time of the year, heading out to the coop as the surrounding vegetation slowly emerges from the darkness remains simple and pleasant.

Approaching the coop from the east, the first sign of life usually pops up in the east-facing window. Literally. On any given morning, Snow, our white Plymouth Rock, can be found bouncing around at that window, demanding to be let out into the pen for breakfast.

I place the water and feed bowls in the pen, which abuts the south side of the coop, and scatter a few handfuls of feed on the ground. Snow is at the south window by then, above the coop door, watching me work. Sometimes, Rhode Island Red Nellie joins her there. Unlatching the coop door, I greet each chicken by name as she bops down the ramp, running my hand along her back when she emerges. Often, sleepyhead Hope, a Rhode Island Red, needs a bit of a nudge to get her off the roost and out the door.

After watching the hens for a few seconds to see if they look healthy and are behaving normally, I lift the hinged roof on the coop to scoop out the night’s “offerings.” In the warm weather, I install a screen window on the east side of the coop. Then I squat down beside the pen to exchange pleasantries with the hens for a minute or so. We don’t really understand one another, but I like to think that the chickens share the enjoyment I get from these “conversations.” Snow is especially attentive.

My routine completed, I always tell the hens that I’ll see them “in a bit,” meaning several hours later, at snack time. I head back to the garage, then to the warm glow of the house.

There is satisfaction to be found in the quotidian.