Confessions of an impatient, hard-headed man

In an admission which will not come as any surprise to my wife, I'm an impatient man.  A hard-headed man as well.  Those two traits together create a synergistic relationship that often spells trouble.  A perfect storm of sorts.  You'd think I'd learn.  Well...

The photograph below is our new chicken house.  A friend of ours from church had gotten out of the chicken business and was going to tear it down, but offered it to us.  We had to move it about five miles from his house to ours and it was going to take a little work to repair, but the price was right (FREE!) and we needed a safe place to lock up the hens for the night to keep them safe from predators.

Once we got the chicken house moved to our house and in place, this past Saturday we put the door back on, put new chicken wire around the bottom, built a trap door for the hens to enter and exit (to the left of the chicken wire behind the bucket), and put all the roosting bars, nesting boxes and feed box back together on the inside.  Then, racing darkness, me and the boys put one coat of Barn red paint on the chicken house.  The day before, we put one coat of white paint on the inside of the chicken house.  Whew, that was a lot of work!

de Maison de Poulet

Here is where my impatience and hardheadedness comes into play.  I decided that since we had "moved that bus" on our own Extreme Makeover - Chicken House edition, we should move the hens in their new place immediately.  So, I threw some rice in the chicken house, called the chickens and when they had all gone into the house, I shut the doors.  My thought process was that the chickens would see the roosting bars, climb up and roost on them and in a few days, we'd change their habit to where this would be their new roosting place for the night.  In the morning, we'd open the doors and they'd be free to roam and forage on three acres, doing what chickens do best - scratch, eat, poop, and lay eggs.

Sounds like a great plan, huh?


First meal in their new home - note the roosting bars on the east wall

Here is a shot of the north wall with a feed box and four nesting boxes:

And here is a shot of the south wall with six nesting boxes:

"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry."  That quote from a Robert Burns poem and whose 'mice and men' phrase John Steinbeck used to title his famous novel is one I'm very familiar with.  Plans often go awry.  That's all part of it.

My plan went awry.  The hens did not figure out that the roosting bars were to roost on.  Instead, they piled on top of one another in a corner.  Two hours later, I walked to the barn to milk Rosie and decided I'd open the door and check to see how they were enjoying their new home.  I opened the door to find a pile of stressed out chickens in the corner.  As I worked to unpile them, there were two hens on the bottom of the pile that were dead, suffocated I'm sure.  Two big, healthy, brown-egg laying chickens!  Doggonit!

They say we learn by our mistakes.  Some mistakes are expensive.  The moral of the story is that I should have slowed down and perhaps moved them into the chicken house gradually, over the course of several days.  Maybe I should have moved them into the house but left the door open.  Surely I should have checked on them sooner.  You live and learn.  Chickens, like people are creatures of habit.  Some habits are hard to break.