chickens can't skate

They can't. I cannot express in words how funny it is to see a chicken attempt to fly rather than walk on ice. They can't fly, either. The only thing less graceful than a flying chicken, is one attempting to walk across ice.

I spent the first part of my day off work cleaning out horse stalls. A dreadful job any day of the week, but particularly foul when it is cold and wet, and stalls are flooded, and the scraping of the shovel against the rubber floor mats creates this brown sludge that cannot be defined. To make it even more pleasant, the stalls had not been fully stripped and cleaned in weeks, as we haven't shut the horses in the barn due to the unseasonably warm weather. That is, until Ma Nature dumped a few inches of rain on the existing deep mud, and topped it off with a solid half inch or better of ice.

When you walk across this, you can see water moving below the ice and above the dead brown grass. It is treacherous walking. It is even more difficult pulling a giant dump cart meant to be attached to and hauled by a garden tractor, full to the top with cold manure slop. Did I mention the two flat tires? That is why I married a big strong man. I shoveled, he dumped. It is a good partnership.

Three clean stalls later, I realized that the chickens weren't coming in from the coop to the horse barn for treats. I went out to the coop to add another layer of wood shavings to their bedding, and couldn't even get them out of my way to do that. It was then that I got to watch my first "chicken meets ice" incident.

One hen hopped right out of the coop onto the ice and went skidding and flopping like a fish out of water. She may have not turned visibly red, but I know an embarrassed chicken when I see one. The rest of the hens were a bit more wary. One tried very unsuccessfully to fly straight to the horse barn. Remember: chickens can't fly. What they can do, is flap miserably for a few seconds, just above the ground, and then crash viciously to the unforgiving ice below, slide skidding and flopping (again, like a fish) and attempt take-off once again into the slightly more graceful act of "flying" ... it took about three cycles of this before the hen made it to the ice-free barn aisle. The others looked around at each other and me like, we really don't need the extra chicken candy, thanks anyway.

So my next half hour was spent making a chicken sidewalk. I raked and scraped and shoveled the dirty hay and manure dust and various dry litter from the barn aisle and hay storage area floors, and sprinkled it along the quickest route from the barn to the coop. A skid-safe path for my little friends. Then I tossed out their candy (scratch grains) and let them enjoy picking through the wood shavings in the newly cleaned stalls. They do a great job of spreading out the horses' bedding for me.

I'm sorry, this blog really needed video, and I didn't get any. I hope I did a good enough job of painting the visual for you.

(Chicken photo above is our bantam silkie cockerel, Fluffy.)