How the Hen House Turns

In the early days, circa 1977, whenever I was feeling low, I would wander down the hill and sit in the chicken pen. The chickens didn’t mind. They knew me pretty well. After checking me out to see if I’d brought them some table scraps, they would go back to their pecking around the pen yard.

Chickens are good at accepting whatever fate hands them. They didn’t mind if I decided not to let them out into the greater back yard. They let me sit in peace. I suspect there’s something to be learned from beings that don’t hang too much on their fantasies.

I haven’t always sat in chicken pens. In 1945, I was chasing 20 chickens around a 40-acre apricot orchard in Hayward, Calif. My future husband Don was raising a few hens in the back yard of a small house in southern Colorado. During the very cold winters, he took them into the house every night. Naturally, in 1973, when it came time for our 6-year-old daughter to learn some responsibility, we agreed that she should have some chickens.

We chose the location of the chicken pen carefully, very carefully–not too much shade to retard the melting of winter snow, not too little shade to provide shelter from the hot dry winds of spring.

“Better tie into this big ponderosa,” I said. ”It should give some noon-time shade.” The sun can be very hot in the mountains of New Mexico.

“Can’t,” Don said. “The roof would hit the branches.”

“Roof? What roof? I thought we just paced off the pen.”

We had paced off the chicken house, he informed me. The yard would be added later.

Our chickens would not have a common garden-variety chicken shed. They would have an airtight, soundproof house—insulated against noise, cold and wind. Its walls would be built of $8-a-sheet CD plywood and sealed on the inside with Celotex. All would be nailed securely onto two by four studs supported by a poured concrete foundation. The house would be furnished with three sturdy nest boxes and two roosts measured to optimum height.

The calculation of that optimum height was no simple matter. If the roosts were too low the chickens wouldn’t use them. If the roosts were too high, the chickens would bump their heads on the ceiling, which had to be low enough to conserve heat.

Two-thirds of the chicken house was planned as a storage shed for grain bags and a playhouse for our daughters. After four long weekends of hard work, the finishing touches were added–a skylight fitted with clear plastic, two-inch diameter ventilators inset at strategic places beneath the roosts, and the roosts.

When it was all done, the hens-to-be would have free access to a yard half the size of a tennis court, fenced with four-by-four posts and six-foot-high chicken wire. Two-by-four beams carefully notched into the four-by-four posts held the wire at the top, and the best pine slash available was used as a liner to keep the rare six-foot-high chicken wire wrinkle-free.

I worried a lot about all the furnishings in the chicken house. It looked to me as if the chickens would bump their heads on the heat-conserving, lowered, insulated ceiling when they hopped up on their roosts for the night, if they did. And how would they know to lay their eggs in the nest boxes? The whole project seemed like an exercise in wishful thinking.

At last the chicken house was ready, complete with hand-picked straw in the nest boxes. I don’t think Don really intended to make it bomb-proof, but I suspect that the neighbors had singled it out as the best shelter around in case of disaster. (To be continued.)