Chicken Pickin'

As the screen door slammed behind me, the cold hit me like it was something hard. It made me inhale sharply, and then breathe shallowly.  My eyeballs hurt. The inside of my nose burned. My exposed cheeks soon felt stiff; they stung as if someone had slapped them.

The snow made a satisfying crunch under my feet as I clomped to the barn in my boots. My husband shoveled a path the whole way there. It was quite a treat not to have to march through the deep snow to the barn.

Children's trails criss-crossed the path. The marks of their boots, sleds, dragged shovels, and clumps of packed snow littered the otherwise smooth whiteness in zig-zag lines. They have wanted to play in the snow more than I have let them. The low temperatures and wind chills have restricted their time outside.

The wind rustled and rattled through the dead, bleached-brown beech and oak leaves that still clung tenaciously in the understory of the woods. The taller tree trunks swayed slowly. The sky above them was a muted blue, and the rising sun cast a rosy hue along the horizon.

A red tail hawk called as I rounded the corner of the pole barn. When I struggled to free the gate from the snow, where it had frozen, the raptor rose from along the back pasture fence and flew over the treetops with another characteristic screech. As I rounded the hoop house on my way to let out the chickens, I paused for a moment to watch its departure on slowly flapping, soundless wings.

The hens were clucking and complaining like old women. They brought me back to the task at hand. I could hear them scuffling in their impatience to leave the coop. With a great flapping, rustling of feathers, and squawking, they eagerly burst out of the pop-door as soon as I opened it.

I checked the plug on the heated waterer. I turned on the two heat lamps. I checked their feed. I counted them and looked them over. Two of them had tail feathers pulled. They need more room to roam so that they won't feather-pick. But when the weather warms enough to let them out again I will lose them by ones and twos to the hawks... 

and the foxes...

and the coyotes...

and the opossums...                                           and the raccoons....

and a host of other vermin. Such are the dilemmas I will face when the weather warms. In the meantime I will keep the woodpile stocked, keep the wood stove roaring, and hope that some solution presents itself.