…and by entertained, of course I mean freaked out and losing their minds, all you need do is clean their enclosure.

I practice the ‘deep litter’ method of keeping the stench under control. It’s simple, cheap, and best of all requires very little labor. The theory, as I understand it, (I could go look it up, but neither of us really care) is that chicken shit releases lots of nitrogen. To counteract the nitrogen, you need to release lots of carbon. Pile the enclosure deep with wood chips or straw or something like that. For added cool points, turn the whole chicken yard into a compost heap by dumping your kitchen scraps in there. The chickens will eat a lot of it. What they don’t eat will attract bugs, which the chickens will eat. To get at the stuff they like to eat they will scratch in the litter obsessively, mixing their shit in with the litter and digging into the dirt, making the whole mess deeper still.

Hey, it works. Last summer I almost stopped feeding my hens commercial pellets entirely, because they found almost all their own food – and I don’t even pasture them. Plus it doesn’t stink.

But sooner or later the chicken shit wins. Then a lot of that mess has to come out of there to make room for new. I’ve got six birds in there right now: Four pullets, #7 the PTSD’d Brahma, and Selma who gets her own little coop. They produce a lot of shit. They also produce a lot of drama when I need to rake out their yard. It’s a little annoying at times: They’re all convinced I might kill them at any time, even though I always treat them kindly. They shouldn’t have enough mind or memory to be right about the ‘kill them at any time’ thing, which of course they are. But let me do anything in there more upsetting than fill their feeder, and they lose what little minds they have.

So to keep from working in a cloud of freaked-out chickens, I have to use strategy: Open all the doors on the big coop and clean it out first. Then close all the coop doors except the small upper one. Start raking in the yard, which will send them stampeding for safety into the coop. Close the small door. Now I’ve got the place to myself. Rake out the yard, wheelbarrow the trash away, spread new straw. Then open the coop and re-pack the nesting boxes, which of course sends them stampeding out of the coop.

It’s not hard to outsmart a chicken. But it is frequently necessary, because the only way to get them to cooperate is to convince them they’re outsmarting you.