What a care visit actually includes

A Modern Hen care visit is a full reset of your henhouse and a quiet health check on every bird, done on a set schedule so you never have to think about the parts of chicken keeping that aren't fun. In a single visit we clean and re-bed the henhouse, scrub and refill water, top up feed, check each hen, walk the run and hardware and leave you a short written note on what we saw. Most visits run 30 to 45 minutes depending on flock size and the season.

The point isn't a quick tidy. It's the difference between a henhouse that stays healthy through a wet Marin winter and one that quietly slides toward damp bedding, mites or a hen who's been off her feed for three days before anyone noticed.

What happens during a standard care visit

Every visit follows the same order so nothing gets skipped. We work the same way at a hillside place in Mill Valley as we do on a flat lot in San Anselmo.

• Bedding. We remove soiled bedding, check the boards underneath for moisture or mold and lay fresh material. In winter we bed deeper and watch the corners where damp collects.
• Water. We dump, scrub and refill waterers. Standing green water is where most flock illness starts, so this is never a top-off. In a freeze we check that nothing's iced over.
• Feed. We refill feeders, note how fast the flock is going through feed and flag a sudden drop. Eating less is often the first real sign something's wrong.
• The birds. We lay eyes on every hen. We watch how they move, check combs and eyes, look for clear breathing and feel for body condition on any bird that looks off.
• The henhouse and run. We test latches, check the ramp and roosting bars, look for gaps a raccoon could work and scan the run fence and netting.
• Eggs. We collect what's there and tell you what laying looks like for the week.

How is this different from me just cleaning it myself?

You could do most of this yourself, and plenty of our clients did before they called us. The difference is consistency and a trained eye. A care visit happens on the same rhythm whether it's raining, you're traveling, or life got busy. And the person doing it has seen what early mites look like on a vent, what a respiratory rattle sounds like and how a predator tests a latch before it gets in. Those are the things that cost a flock when they're missed.

We also fix small problems before they become expensive ones. A loose hinge, a worn ramp cleat, a latch that's gone stiff. On predators specifically, the hardware matters more than people expect. A raccoon-proof two-step latch costs about four dollars more than a basic hook, and it's the single cheapest thing standing between your flock and a bad night. We'd rather catch that on a Tuesday visit than the morning after.

What you get after the visit

You don't have to be home, and you don't have to wonder what we found. After every visit we send a short written note. It covers what we did, anything we noticed on the birds or the build and anything we'd keep an eye on. If something needs your decision, like a hen we want to watch or a repair worth doing, we say so plainly and never pad it.

Over time those notes become a record. We can see that a hen's laying tapered three weeks before she stopped, or that the run fence has needed the same corner re-tensioned twice. That history is part of what you're paying for. It makes the next visit smarter.

We travel a lot, and we used to come home half-expecting bad news. Now we read the note, and the henhouse looks better than when we left.

How often visits happen

Most flocks do well on a weekly or every-other-week rhythm, and that's where we start with new clients. Larger flocks, wetter sites and the heart of a Marin winter usually call for weekly. Smaller, well-drained setups can often stretch to biweekly once we know the place. We set the cadence with you and adjust it as we learn your flock rather than locking you into a number on day one.

The whole idea is simple. You keep the good parts of having chickens, the eggs and the company of them in the yard, and we quietly handle the rest on a schedule you can forget about.