On
April 21, 2012, my wife Liz and I - chicken neophytes - bought
three
laying hens, who set up shop in a coop in the backyard of our
city lot here in Maine. The makeup of our small flock has changed since then, but not our love of chickens. The Hen Chronicles explore life with our tenants.
To say that chickens can be skittish is like saying Donald Trump can be cocky, or Gov. Chris Christie could stand to lose a few pounds. The statement is accurate as
far as it goes, but it’s far too understated to capture the reality of the
situation.
I learned early on that it’s unwise to make sudden moves around
hens, or to subject them to loud noises. They do startle easily, but I
tend to forget that because I’ve learned to move calmly in their
neighborhood, and to talk to them in a soothing tone of voice. As a
result, our hens rarely get riled up when I’m around.
Still, the panic button in a chicken's brain is a tricky device. Although it's easy to identify -- and avoid -- some of the stimuli that will set off the alarm, others are less predictable. That's why I was momentarily taken aback by what happened when I fed “the girls” at dawn on Thursday.
Before
I place their feed bowl in the pen, I usually grab a handful of pellets
from the bowl and scatter them, so the hens can peck, as they love to
do. But I forgot to do that Thursday morning. By the time I
remembered, Snow, Nellie and Hope were gathered round the bowl, chowing down.
That's when I tried to set things right . . . by unwittingly doing the wrong thing.
Opening
the lid on top of the pen, I reached in and gently lifted the bowl
while the chickens were still eating, so I could toss some pellets onto
the ground.
Big mistake.
You'd think a skulk of foxes
had invaded the pen. All hell broke loose. Feathers flew, literally, as
the chickens ran around, squawking and hopping and flapping their wings
and raising an unholy ruckus in classic “sky is falling!” mode.
Folks probably could hear the kerfuffle two towns over, or so it seemed to me
at the time.
Within seconds, the riot
ended as quickly as it had begun. The hens returned to their breakfast, as if nothing untoward had happened. But evidence of the
“crisis” lingered. Two Rhode Island Red feathers that flew out of the
pen during the melee had come to rest atop the chicken wire.
Chicken
Little may be the stuff of folk tales, but even a fictional chick who overreacts to an acorn falling on her head can easily find like-minded cousins in the real world.
There are eight million stories in the naked henhouse. This has been one of them.
