Chicken Lock-Out

One day last week, I was finishing up my afternoon wintertime chores. As always, I focused on my most important task: looking in on the hens before they turn in for the night. (By the way, you can pretty much tell time from your laying hens—they turn into their coop to sleep exactly at dusk, rain or shine, no matter what the season.)

Hens are all about routine. About 15 minutes before beddy-bye, our girls will generally dial down their perpetual foraging. Which is a nice word for the way they tear up the ground, creating huge divots all over the place and move piles of dirt from one spot to another, almost always near the man-door into the pen. Then they’ll wander into their pen to mill around their waterer and feeder. I’ll talk to the hens, ask them about their day, and shake their feeder to redistribute the grains. I’ll also agitate the waterer, and encourage them to get a sip or two.

The hens often pile up dirt behind the white man door into their pen!

Then, because the girls tend to get kind of cranky before bed (I think it’s some kind of hen anxiety about getting the best roosting spot in the coop), I’ll leave the door into the pen partway open, in case anyone wants to go out for some last minute dirt-scratching. And off I’ll go to toss the day’s kitchen scraps on the compost pile and chop some firewood, then take a quick walk down the road to work out the kinks from wood-chopping.

By the time I’m done, it’s nearly dark and the girls are on the roost, so I’ll secure the pen for the night. But on this day, that’s not how it went down.

I went to the pen to close it up, and found the man-door already shut, and a mound of blond feathered creatures huddled up right up against the door. They were hunkered down so tightly they appeared to be one animal.

They’d somehow managed to push the man door closed (again, all the dirt moving around the entryway) and had locked themselves out. And I didn’t hear them complain about it because I’d been walking. So the girls did the next best thing to roosting: piled in together into the dirt to keep warm and secure.

All five seemed fast asleep, although they couldn’t have been there for more than a few minutes. So I talked to them to rouse them. No result. I prodded them a bit. “Come on girls, wake up—you don’t want to sleep outside all night, do you?” (And be food for bigger critters?)

One girl sleepily shifted out of the mound, then finally a second one, but the other three ignored me. I was able to move the door, but not one hen got it: Here the door was open for them, every instinct should tell them to get inside and go roost as usual! But they were too discombobulated to even take a step around the door and enter the pen.

It was up to the human to set them straight. I opened the man door of the coop, then began ferrying the hens, one by one, from the hen yard onto their roost. One or two were compliant enough to let me grasp them, but the others flapped their wings, trying to get away, buck-buck-bucking all the while, and did not like being messed around with.

The last hen in the mound was nestled right down in the dirt—and had a proverbial cow when I extracted her from her little nest and carried her into the coop. There was much agitation and kvetching and to-do-ing as the flock got themselves positioned onto the roost—in the correct pecking order, I assume—and seemed to dislike me very much. (After all I’d done for them!)

The next morning, I wondered if the hens would still be mad at me. Or worse, be afraid of me. But they were back to their usual sunny dispositions. Apparently no harm done, except that I felt terribly guilty for upsetting our girls.

My big takeaway from this experience: make sure that pen door is wide open at bedtime, and the doorway is cleared of that day’s dirt piles! Do you have any hen-keeping advice? Please share it here, or visit me on Facebook!