The Chicken Mansion

                                                           The Chicken Mansion

Harry said he’d be home soon. His job up north was almost done.

“I’m glad it is,” I said relieved, “because your job here is gettin’ bigger by the day. You’re gonna have to build a new chicken house to keep these 15 new peeps in you wanted, because there sure ain’t enough room for ‘em in the old one.”

Thus, the Chicken Mansion came to be built.

It didn’t start out as a ‘mansion’.

“Just build some of those things like we saw in that newspaper article, okay, Harry?”

I was talking about the little A-frame tractor-thing chicken pens, about 3’x3’x3’ that you can move around from place to place so the birds get new grass every few days and don’t strip any one place bare to the dirt.

Unfortunately that’s not what we ended up with.

Two weeks and $250.00 later that thing he built was six feet tall, eight feet wide, and ten feet long!

Oh, yes.

It’s lovely and all. Thing is, you have to hook it up to the truck to move it. There went my “easy-to-move-around” plan.

Harry promised to get a trailer hitch put on my truck.

He got the pen all set up and we put the hens and all the baby chicks in it. Well, they loved it. Fresh air, fresh grass, lots of bugs, and everything. The rooster was still by himself in the old pen and he was pretty pissed off about that, but the hens were happy to get a little vacation.

Then, disaster.

I was at the desk looking out the window when I saw something bobbing around over by the fence. “Oh, all the little quail have come back,” I thought. I looked closer. It wasn’t all the little quail at all, but all the little peeps that were wandering around outside just having a whale of a good time. I almost had a heart attack getting out there to see what was what. I guess the hens were harassing them so they staged a prison break, dug ‘em a tunnel under one corner of the pen, scooted out, and went on the lam.

I opened the door to the pen and started herding them back inside which was pointless since they were just going in the door and right back out the tunnel. I went over to the woodpile and got several scrap pieces to block their escape route and started herding them in the door again. That didn’t work either because every time I opened the door to herd one in, two others ran out.

I went to the house to get all the latest chicken-wrangling equipment, a broom and a big deep cardboard box, and started to sweep them into the box. This worked better but not fast enough. You know exactly who my partner was in this little endeavor?

Yup, Lib’s dog Bella. The black Lab. Bred to hunt and catch Birds!

I was sweeping peeps one way and trying to herd her back with the broom the other way. Simply put, peeps are so stupid that they would run right into her mouth, so she caught one and off under the house she went with her little snack.

No. Harry still hadn’t got that lattice fixed!

I did get the rest of them back in the pen finally, and I was about to pass out from the heat. It was only about a hundred and ten in the shade out there, and guess who came rolling in the driveway right then in his nice cool air-conditioned truck?

He went out that night and caught up the hens while they were on the roost and moved them back into the old pen. The rooster was ecstatic. The hens seemed none the worse for wear. The chicks have not busted out of the slammer again, either.

If he says one word about hatching anything else out on this place I will whack him with the broom.

I think he saw it in my eyes