The hens housed in the small barn are retired. Buffy is ailing. Twinkydink and Edwina are ancient. Siouxsie is only four, but is a ditzy, unproductive Polish, who, for the last few months, has gone through bouts of labored, gasping, breathing. Betsy has worked hard in her day, visiting hundred of school children. She’s now six years old and deserves her quiet time.

I haven’t found an egg in the little barn for many months. In fact, the last was laid there on August 13. So, it was with some surprise yesterday, when I saw this:

Who left this prize?

It was Siouxsie! She’s the only hen in the flock that lays long white eggs.

Not that she cares or remembers.

Anyway, thanks, Siouxsie!

Egg laying always picks up in February. I’m seeing more eggs from the Gems. Nonetheless, I’m not expecting many more eggs from the little barn, but who knows? Look who’s been checking out the nesting boxes.

Lately I’ve been fielding questions about hens that are losing their feathers now, in late winter. This is not molting season. In many places (like here) the weather is frigid. It’s not a good time for a hen to look like this:

The best layers molt late in the fall, not in the coldest months of winter. So, what’s going on?

A molt can be a sign of stress and/or disease. So, do observe your molting hen’s behavior. Is she eating and drinking and acting normally? Check for signs of external parasites. There might be something amiss.

But, in the cases that I’ve been hearing about, the hens are fine. What’s happening is that people, in their desire to get chicks at a time convenient to them (but not what farmers saw as prudent in the past) , are buying birds that hatched out of season. Mail order hatcheries are selling chicks year-round. If you bring your chicks home in September, then their first molt will be in the worst weather of late winter, and you won’t see eggs again from those hens until early summer.

In the past, when winter eggs were pricey, a farmer’s profit would be made from the good winter layers. Chicks hatched in the spring and were carefully matured so that the first year they laid through the winter, and in the second year molted in the fall and provided eggs again as winter waned in February and March. There is nothing in my extensive collection of vintage poultry manuals that gives advice about hens molting in the winter because it just wasn’t done.

Let me know if you have hens that are molting now, and let me know how they’re getting on.

This is the view from my home office window. I took this photo yesterday morning. Do you see the fox?

Here’s a closer view (taken with a zoom lens from inside, through a screen.)

I wonder what happened to its tail. It’s a hard life, even for the predators. I watched this fox leap and pounce in the tall grasses, likely hunting voles and other small creatures. Even in the act of killing, a fox is charming and beautiful. It was a warm day, and the snow had melted away. I was going to let the girls out, but I did not. A fox would rather fill its belly with one large chicken than a multitude of mice.

I have heard several very sad stories lately of entire flocks decimated by predators. I’ve been told of favorite hens taken in the night. Do not underestimate how hungry the predators are. Do not think that your fencing is secure. Years ago, I learned the hard way. We had installed chicken wire 5 feet high, and buried 6 inches underground. Hawk netting was tightly secured above. In the hot summer we left the windows and pop door open, thinking that the hens were safe. We’d never had a problem. The fenced coop was inside of a fenced backyard. I had a good dog who kept predators away. One night a raccoon climbed up, ripped the netting off of the enclosure and strode right into the coop. She killed four hens.

You might go for a couple of years without a predator attack and think that your hens are well-protected. I know someone who surrounded the coop with a sturdy dog pen; it was even enclosed overhead with the wire panels. A weasel slipped through the 2- inch gap in the gate.

Learn from my experiences and not your own heartache. Close your hens up at night. Latch them from the inside. Plan for daytime attacks, too. Even if you free-range your chickens, build a coop and pen that is spacious enough so that the hens can be kept enclosed. There will be days when foxes are hunting nearby.