To Move a Chicken. Or Seven.
On the metabolic strength of a single hardboiled egg, three teaspoons of crunchy peanut butter, a Honeycrisp apple just about gone off, and a cup of hot organic green tea, I refortified the chicken coop. It took just a little over two hours by myself, putting me a day ahead of schedule on the plan to move our new flock of egg layers into their winter home.
If I liked beer, it would be Miller time.
I primed my energy pump on the pre-dawn walk around 17+ acres of frosty dead goldenrod stalks and naked sycamore saplings before sitting down to that humble breakfast and a few New York Times mobile app games (Vertex is my favorite, then Spelling Bee, and the Mini crossword). Most days that’s enough to make me feel virtuous about my daily activity level and get me out of the house on Mondays for the only day I work from the office. By the time I connect that last set of numbers on the Vertex puzzle to create the image (they give you a cleverly-worded clue, but sometimes it’s the opposite of helpful), I’m ready for a comfortable chair and some noble nonprofit tasks that don’t require boots or work gloves.
But on a Saturday morning that’s sunny, with seven egg layers in a pasture pen in the field just beyond the now-tucked in garden, my mission was clear and involved the use of all my limbs: upgrade their living quarters to a slant-roofed coop that would keep them safe and warm, and make egg-gathering in the spring so much easier. I collected the tools and supplies I’d need, put on my big girl work jeans and boots, and breathed in a gentle Zen approach to the work ahead. No rush, Sunday was supposed to be just as sunny and a bit warmer in case of work plan overflow, and by Monday morning no matter what, those girls would be moved uptown.
We have two coops, one we inherited and one Patrick built when we expanded our laying flock to number in the low 30’s. The inherited one is a beauty, made of cinder blocks and clapboard, with a charming double-slant corrugated roof and three cut-out windows covered in chicken wire inside and out. The new one took on more of a floating deck with walls design and a single-slant roof made from those wavy plastic panels one finds way in the back of Lowe’s in the lumber section. Patrick smartly installed a clear section in between two solid white ones to give some light and hope during the gray winter months (layers need about fourteen hours of light to produce an egg). Add two 1” x 6" boards for roosting at night and a floor all fluffy with pine shavings, and you’ve got a poultry palace, a chicken version of the Ritz with daily room service provided by the two-leggeds.
Both coops have been vacant for more than a year. The last of our meat chickens spent their final days in the cinder block structure before resting comfortably in the upright freezer. A weasel (or maybe it was a fisher?) took out all but one of the layers, turning the new coop into a crime scene of feathers and headless carcasses; we moved the one surviving girl to the largest empty rabbit hutch behind the potting shed where we could coddle her through the trauma of it all. After a thorough investigation of the structure, we knew it needed to be reinforced with all manner of hardware cloth and chicken wire to close up the gaps where a weasel (or fisher?) would flatten its ribcage to gain access.
I’m not what anyone would call a carpenter. My go-to tools for most construction jobs include t-posts, zip ties and bungee cords (you’d be surprised what you can build with all that). Time and weather had created larger gaps between the flooring and the walls of this newer coop, so closing those up was Job One. That meant chicken wire and a staple gun. I was up for it but needed to consider the torque it would take to deliver the staple to its destination. I looked down at my arthritic hands. Patrick was asleep and recovering from a disagreement he’d had last weekend with his bandsaw and two of the fingers on his right hand, so I was on my own (a rare short stint in the ER and six stitches later, we were back home that rainy Saturday with pain meds on board and a full pot of tea steeping on the kitchen counter. But here’s some added fun: guess which finger needed to be splinted? We’ve already gotten some great humor mileage out of that). I breathed in that Zen approach again, and not surprisingly, the job went smoothly. More than a dozen staples missed the target on the chicken wire screen door I installed, but I wasn’t leaving that coop until it was fisher, weasel, mink and stoat-proof. Patrick stopped by offering encouragement and his keen but skeptical engineering eye as I was attaching the tin-snipped edge of the wire to some nails pounded into the bottom of the doorframe. The design concept was to ever so slightly pull the wire down to catch on the nails, making it fully enclosed but removable to refill the feeder and watering can (we’ll see…).,I lugged the two bales of pine shavings into the coop, sliced them open, and kicked the chunks of fluff around just enough to cover the random “restroom” areas of the floor; the girls would scatter the remaining piles of shavings once their curiosity and instinct for scratching kicked in. The dining area set up on some old milk crates and open for business, it was time to get the layers from their pasture pen up behind the house and settle them in.
It went more or less to plan. I climbed into the pen while Patrick held the blue plastic tarp down over the top to discourage any panicked flight risks (the chickens, not me). I crouched down, talked reassuringly to them about their new living quarters, and then reached for their feet and grabbed. Lots of squawking and flapping (the chickens, not me) and I climbed out gingerly, holding a chicken in each gloved hand and maneuvering my way out of the pen with my elbows and legs (grateful for my morning yoga practice). Only two of the seven girls escaped and I cleverly lured them back into the pasture pen at dusk, propping it up on a storage bin so they would crawl back in to roost. By that time, Patrick was back in his studio making peace with his bandsaw, so I plucked them from the pen myself. Same technique, but a little slower having to manage the tarp with my head since my hands were full of chickens. Sometimes I think we should have a YouTube channel.
We’d been talking about this project since early spring. It felt good to see it done and working its purpose, without injury or permanent setbacks. Of course, the real test would come in the morning when I opened the door to the now Fort Knox of chicken coops to find them all thriving and thankful as only egg layers can be. Coming back from my morning walk before dawn, the fields all soft and frosty against a backdrop of cotton candy pink and blue skies to the east, I expanded my final orbit to include this morning-after inspection, calling out a cheerful “good morning, girls!” as I approached their new digs. They’re all fine, I’m happy to report, and I’ll refill the waterer after lunch. They’ll stay inside for a couple weeks to get them used to roosting there. That’ll give me time to design and build their enclosed “patio” so they can peck about in the sunshine and snow with nary a care about predators as the winter months unfold.
Best go check on our inventory of t-posts and zip ties.
