I’ve been busy in recent weeks with the fallout from the pecking order. Life with chickens certainly has its advantages when a dozen eggs is going for nearly $10 a dozen in the local grocery store, but managing ten hens can require a willingness to think outside the box at times.
Or maybe inside the box, as I’ll explain.
Henpecking is a real thing, and by that I’m not referring to the husband with a domineering wife, although the dynamics can be similar. During winter, especially, I’ve learned that chickens get bored inside their coop, even a large one like the one I built for my ladies. When it’s cold, as it usually is here in winter, I keep the door to their outside run closed up tight to keep them warmer.
The coop is unheated but I built it like a solar greenhouse, well insulated everywhere except for the glass on the south wall. The coop warms into the 60s and 70s when its sunny, even when it’s below zero, and it even warms a bit on cloudier days. Keeping that heat inside helps maintain warmer temperatures overnight, which is when the hens can be the most stressed when the temperatures drop well below zero.
One thing I’ve learned about chickens, at least the hardier stock like the Rhode Island Reds and the Barred Rocks that we’re keeping right now, is that they are tough. It can be 35-below outside and they’re not complaining, at least in a coop that is insulated and free of cold drafts. That is not to suggest, for a moment, that it stays warm in an unheated coop, even one built like mine. My birds rely on their dense layer of feathers to avoid freezing to death, and that’s why henpecking can be a real problem.
It turns out, it’s not so much pecking as pulling. Some mornings, it can look like the hens just finished a pillow fight, the kind where the pillow breaks and the feathers go flying. I came out earlier in the winter to find one of the hens had been picked nearly clean sometime in the evening after their last water check and it had frozen solid during the night.
I suspect one of the two Rocks, both of which have spectacularly pristine, dense plumage that leaves me to wonder if they wouldn’t be right at home on an ice floe with a flock of penguins.
Of course, it probably wasn’t just one hen. As is often the case with humans as well, once one bird is identified as weak, it can become a pile-on. In either case, I silently vowed to keep it from happening again.
So, when sizeable bare patches started showing up on two more hens, a Rock and a Red, and with another cold snap looming, I removed the two birds from the coop and put them in the solar greenhouse next to the chicken coop. I put down straw in the greenhouse’s growing bed and fenced them in there, figuring I’d keep them there until their feathers grew back in.
They spent the first couple nights lying in the straw but as the 30-below air moved in, I came up with a different plan to keep them warmer. I put about six inches of straw in a cardboard box, which I set on a workbench in the greenhouse, figuring they’d stay warmer up off the floor. After a bit of chasing them around the garden bed, I was able to grab each of the birds and I placed them in the box and covered it with a blanket. The next morning, the two birds were just fine and I put them back in the garden bed for the day. That evening, I went out to put them in their box, figuring I’d have to chase them around again like the night before. Instead, I found both birds perched side-by-side, right next to the box on the workbench.
“Just a coincidence?” I wondered as I picked up both birds without any fuss and put them in their box for the night. But there they were for the next three straight nights. As the sun went down, the two birds would jump over their fence and fly up onto the workbench so I could put them in their box. That is, until the fourth night, when I went out to find they had already put themselves to bed and were sleeping comfortably in their box. All I had to do was tuck them in for the night with their blanket. And that’s how it’s been every night since then. The Red has already grown back her feathers, but the two birds seem to have bonded so well I won’t put them back in the coop until they’re both fully feathered again.
I figure their reintroduction back to the coop could involve more feathers flying, so I’m planning to move the two suspected troublemakers into the greenhouse for a week or so to, hopefully, readjust flock dynamics. By that time, we’ll be well into March and I’ll start opening up their outside run more often, giving the birds something better to do than pluck feathers from their coop mates.
Yes, managing hens can be a challenge at times. But with the price of eggs these days…