The Outside Chicken Pen

After we got the chickens moved into their coop, my dad started working on their outside pen. We wanted them to be able to spend time outside without being eaten by coyotes. So my dad put up posts and wrapped wire around them. He leaned ladders up against the window, inside and outside.  He then opened the window to let the chickens out.

They seem to have gotten the hang of going outside by themselves.

 Going back inside is a different story.

The other night, my mom and I came home from a wedding when we realized the chickens were still outside. My dad and brother weren't home, and it was getting darker rapidly. We don't have a light out there, so we had to get the chickens inside as soon as we got home.

 



We went out to the chicken coop, hoping that most the of the chickens had gone inside by themselves. But they hadn't. There were still about twenty chickens out there.

So there we were, in our fancy dresses and shoes, catching chickens and putting them inside. Thankfully, they were all half-asleep. The catching them was the easy part. However, when we put them inside, they didn't go down the ladder by themselves. They just sat on the window. We had to push them in.

We couldn't see inside the coop, but we kept hearing thump, thump, thump. We were scared that the chickens were falling to their deaths inside the coop. I went inside to make sure that we weren't killing our chickens. And we weren't. Once they got inside, they were able to fly to the ground. It wasn't graceful, by any means, but they were still alive.

It was quite the experience, catching the chickens in our wedding clothes.