The Great Chicken Escape

A couple of mornings ago I walked to the coop to give the Ladies some leftovers and noticed, out of the corner of my eye, one of our Ameraucanas on the outside of the coop, right by my feet!  Thoroughly confused, I let her into the coop.

I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out how she escaped!  Maybe she snuck out the night before when I gave the Ladies fresh water?  But that would mean that she spent the night outside of the coop!!!  All alone?!  Poor thing!

Then, on Sunday, while sitting at the kitchen table playing online, I again saw something out of the corner of my eye in the backyard.  Yep, another chicken!  What the heck!

So, I threw on my boots and ran outside to figure out what was happening and found this…

Forgive the poo…chickens live here 😉

Ah yes…a nice, big hole in the fencing of the coop.

The tearing winds we’ve been experiencing over the past several days did a nice little job of creating the perfect portal into the back yard.  And the Ladies?  Well, they’re just smart enough to utilize it by hopping up onto their feed bins and out into the yard.

So now, our patch job won’t last for long (it involves a bungee and a seed starting tray), but it will do just fine until we can get out there and properly fix up the coop.  There’s a lot to do to the coop this spring to spruce it up for the Ladies and make it more accessible for us humans…like turning the coop door to open out instead of in (pushing straw every time we have to walk into the coop is no fun), and creating a frame for the bird netting over the top of the coop to be properly supported by (the bird netting protects the Ladies from our neighborhood cats) and then, of course, re-covering said frame with new netting.  Yes, lots to do.