I enlisted the help of my daughter and her friend to move the hens into their winter residence, the Chicken Palace. The hope was that the pens would fit through the palace doors. If they would, I could just roll each one in, open the lid, let the chickens come out at their own pace, and then roll the pen back out. The hope was not the reality. The reality was that the pens were about 9 inches too wide. Plan B was to roll the pen up to the door, prop it open and herd the chickens through the open doors. Plan B didn’t work much better than Plan A. The chickens really didn’t want to leave their summer homes. This meant that I got to crawl into the pens and pull them out four at a time and manually toss them through the palace doors.
The first pen went in fairly easily, all things considering. The second one was quite leaky, leaving a trail of hens as we went. As mentioned earlier, the hens don’t like leaving the safety of their pen, but once they are out, they really don’t like to be caught. This gave me some quality time chasing them back and forth around Dave’s tractors.
In the end, we finally got them all in the palace and bedded down for the winter. In a future post I will give details on the palace and my plans for improving it.
