Shovelling the Chicken house

Bryan was heading out to clear the Inklin trail east of here. I am a hindrance when there is so much new snow. He has to keep looking back to make sure I'm still coming. So my job today is to shovel off the chicken house. "How am I going to get up there, I ask"...."Just put on your snowshoes and walk up". So that is how I got up there after three shovel fulls off the roof. There was a good 3 ft of heavy snow and lots of frozen ice. I used a rubber mallet. Temp is 0 today. Hard to remember that a little over a week ago it was -30. We have 8 chickens and they have given us 6 to 8 eggs a day since they started laying the beginning of Oct. They have laying mesh in their warm house, but each day they also get all our vegetable clippings and they love pasta. We also give them whole wheat and oyster shell.
There is a wire strung door dividing Bryan's little skinning shop and the chicken indoor house. He talks to them and they talk away back. He really loves his chickens. Last week I said to Bryan, "I must look up dark circle around eyes disease on chickens". "It wasn't like that yesterday." Bryan looked at me strange as I headed to the computer. He called out..."it's eating too many chicken feathers disease." Now he knows more about chickens then me, so I nodded and said okay. "I'll look it up. There must be something we can do." He started laughing ....and admitted he had circled that one chickens eyes with black marking pen. It's the only one picking feathers off the other ones, and now we can watch him.






Bryan road into the yard on Poncho at 5:30 all smiles....his day had been real hard, just like the last two days breaking trail after 3 ft of new snow but at least the box was full. A nice Lynx and 2 Marten.