cleaning out the hens

I cleaned the chicken house out this morning.  I play up the orduresome duty, mucking out the hens, ho ho, but it isn't actually as bad as it sounds.  Healthy hen droppings are pretty dry, and sawdust provided in generous quantities is pretty absorbent, so you aren't dealing with wet, oozy muck.  Some of the time you can get away with just cleaning the roosting board, which is the shelf provided under the perch precisely to catch the regular shower of guano that hens produce as they sit there in a row through the night, but over time droppings find their way down on the the hen house floor, and periodically you need to shovel the whole lot out and replace with fresh sawdust.

The old sawdust plus droppings go on the compost heap where they make a useful addition, the nitrogen in the muck helping the carbon heavy sawdust component rot down.  That's what you need for a good compost heap, a balance between green and woody waste.  Too much green and it turns to slime, as neat lawn clippings do.  Too woody and you wait forever and a day for your compost to rot down.

Cleaning the house was complicated by the fact that one of the hens has gone broody.  She sat tight in her nesting box as I shovelled the muck off the roosting board, and stared at me balefully while I cleaned the sawdust off the floor.  The roof over the roosting board and one end wall of the hen house are hinged so that you can open them right up to get access for cleaning.  This is essential. If you are ever thinking of buying or building a hen house then think about how you will muck it out. The Systems Administrator based ours on a design in the Golden Cockerel book of poultry houses, though massively scaling up all the structural members.  This came in useful when a large tree fell on it, but that probably isn't something you need to factor in as a general rule.

Finally I wanted to change over the sawdust in the nesting box, so that our eggs would be laid on fresh, pristine wood shavings.  The nesting box is a small box attached to one side of the main house, designed to make the hens feel secure while they're laying.  It must be a vulnerable position to be in, sitting there with an egg half way up your fundament, and hens like a dark, secure space in which to lay.  The nesting box has its own little hinged roof for purely human convenience, so that you can check for eggs without having to open the main house.

I picked up the broody and thrust her gently into the body of the hen house.  I'd previously taken two eggs from under her when I let the others out into their run before breakfast, and she was not sitting on anything, just sitting.  She won't lay while she's broody, and meanwhile the other hens do seem to find her brooding presence in the box mildly off-putting.  I had to retrieve an egg from the run the other day, which the old lady Maran had left there rather than go and share the nesting box with Broody.

The hen turned around and tried to come back into the nest box, then after the first couple of shovelfuls of sawdust dealt me a mighty blow on the back of my hand with her beak.  I was grateful that I was wearing my gardening gloves, which are quite thick, and after that had to alternate between clearing sawdust and fending her off with dabs of the shovel.  She presently gave up trying to drive me away or get back into the nesting box, and instead gave way to a great outpouring of indignation, shrieking her complaint at the top of her voice.  There are few animals capable of expressing outrage as eloquently as a hen.  I poured clean sawdust into the box, while she bounced on the perch and screamed.  I locked the roof of the nesting box down again when I'd finished, and after a minute more silence descended as the hen resumed brooding.

I let them out for a run this evening, because it was a couple of weeks since they'd been out and I felt so mean, but the broody stayed in her box.  It seems a waste, when she could be scratching around under the hedge and eating grass, but it's what she wants to do at the moment.  The evening became decidedly chilly, and I was grateful when at half past seven the Systems Administrator appeared in chicken wrangling mode, and herded them back into their run so that I could retreat indoors.