Dazed & Coopfused
It turns out raising chickens is a lot like being back in high school.
Except everyone is laying eggs.
At first, finding their eggs was an event.
We’d discover a tiny pullet egg somewhere completely random: one sitting in the dirt, on top of the shady mound between the coop and the barn where the hens escape the sun most afternoons… another at the bottom of the mound, where the hens like to scratch and dust bathe.
It didn’t seem like they were intentionally hiding the eggs. More like the egg had simply popped out before they expected it or could get ready. We started calling them “oops eggs” and joked, “When you gotta go, you gotta go…”
After a few day of Easter egg hunting - where the eggs were warm, the Easter bunny was a chicken, and nobody had hidden them on purpose - we decided to place golf balls inside the nesting boxes to ‘show’ the girls where to lay.
The new layers got the idea.
It almost seemed like we had successfully established order.
Almost.
Then the hens developed a favorite - bottom row, furthest to the right, closest to the coop door - and that nesting box quickly became ‘The Spot’.
It was as if one hen had discovered it, texted the group chat, and suddenly everyone needed to be there.
The other nesting boxes remain perfectly fine, but this one quickly developed a reputation for being chic and exclusive.
Some mornings, I’ll see the girls forming a queue outside the coop like they’re waiting to get into the kind of bar that has no sign, serves $17 Aperol spritzes, and makes you stand outside for twenty minutes even though you can see empty tables through the window.
They will eventually lay elsewhere, of course. But there is a clear hierarchy.
A preferred table.
A popular corner.
A place where the cool hens sit.
It reminds me of my high school cafeteria.
You could learn a lot about the social order just by looking around the room: who sat together, who had recently switched tables, who was trying to not look like they cared.
And then there were the kids who were too cool to eat in the cafeteria at all.
They were usually the nonconformists reading Vonnegut or Kerouac somewhere in a corner, or the stoners who had mysteriously disappeared to Gennero’s or Sandy’s and sometimes failed to make it back for sixth period.
Over here, we’ve got a couple renegades who have developed a strongly-held, specific idea that the best nesting place is actually not in the coop.
But in the barn.
Specifically, the northeast corner of the barn.
In front of the shelves holding rubber bands and between the window and a box of metal landscape staples.
After finding two eggs there, two days in a row, I tossed a drop cloth down to cushion the eggs. Because if you can’t beat ‘em, you can at least provide some basic accommodations.
Each day, we check the usual spots and track the number of eggs we're collecting, just to make sure no one has started a new lunch table.
Because apparently, the coop has cliques, the barn has the renegades, and we're the administration.
And - if I’m honest - we just want to make sure everyone gets back before sixth period.
