Do these girls look bored to you? 

The things we do to keep our hens happy, for gosh sakes!  We even cut down a tree…

…so that the girls could play Queen of the Hill…

Well, actually…  not for them, really, but they will take any opportunity to amuse themselves.  Here we’ve been grieving the loss of this old Douglas Fir (diseased, but not with blight, as was feared), and the girls want to turn it into a jungle gym!

Each of those rounds weighs 300 pounds or more.  It’s a very good thing that David has a tractor.  The wood and the chips smell divine.  A chicken’s nervous system is sensitive to aromatic oil in cedar chips, but they do fine with fir.  We’re putting the chips from the branches into their run.  Dumb me…  at first I was trying to spread the chips out evenly over the whole run.  Then I realized that they’ll do that work for me in a heartbeat.  Good hens!