Tag: chicken eggs

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Our First Egg!

I thought you would enjoy this post from 2011.  This sweet 5 year old is now 13 and is a great helper on the farm. 
This morning, when I went to move the chickens before 7:00 to their new area of pasture (it was just next to the previous pasture, so I slid the chicken tractor containing the chickens a few feet and moved the fence), I found this egg on the ground inside the tractor!  The girls and shared the small egg, but Scott, my husband, said he wasn’t going to eat a green egg.  It’s just the shell that’s green; the rest of the egg is like an ordinary egg.  I guess I’ll have to crack them and cook them before he sees them in the future!  Three of our chickens, Americanas, will lay blue-green eggs.  Ella has now allowed me to use one of her wooden eggs from her play kitchen to put in the nesting boxes to show the chickens where I want them to lay their eggs in the future.  What a treasure hunt every morning’s visit to the chickens will be now!
Ella, still half asleep, holding the first egg.
The egg is blue-green, and from an Americana; it’s about half the size of a normal egg because the chickens are young.
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Cooking the egg.  It was delicious!  The shell was much harder than usual.
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Waiting for baby chicks

This is a video of my chicken sitting on her eggs.My Buff Orpington chicken has persisted in her delusion that if she sits on eggs long enough, surely they will hatch.  Even though there is no rooster, and even though I removed the eggs every day, she still sat on the nest.  Earlier in the spring I removed a Buff Orpington (I don’t know if this is the same Buff Orpington chicken but I suspect that it is) and her co-delusional chicken to another chicken house without access to a nest for a couple of weeks to break the broodiness.  This process worked for a couple of months, but she has been broody for a month or more, I suppose.  I traveled a lot during July and was not certain which chicken was on the nest.

After I realized she was determined to raise some chicks, I remembered a friend’s offer of fertile eggs. We have had two roosters.  As my girls say, one of them  was nice and stupid, and the other one was mean and smart.  The nice one met his end defending the ladies against a bobcat, and the mean one died last summer at the end of a hatchet blade.  I had scars on my ankles from his spurs, my girls were scared to go into the chicken pen, and with a baby about to become a toddler I didn’t want to risk permanent damage to anyone.  We would like a nice and smart rooster to add to our flock.

My friend gave us a dozen fertile eggs.  In this video you can see and her co-broody.  Originally I planned to split the dozen eggs between the two hens because I believed the Barred Rock was also serious about broodiness.  After I put the eggs under her (watching her carefully and knowing that the ambient air temperature in SC in August is nearly hot enough to brood eggs without a chicken–just kidding, sort of) I realized within a day or less that she was not serious.  She got off the nest, forgot which nest she was supposed to sit on and got onto another nest, sat in the nest backwards, and is generally a mess.

After I saw my Buff Orpington in action, with her constant attention to the eggs and her faithful sitting except for a brief stretch and dust bath in the afternoon, I took the eggs from the Barred Rock and gave them all to the Buff.  One egg broke within the first couple of days.

Another egg broke earlier this week.  Inside the egg was an almost fully-formed chick, complete with feathers.  Although I was sad about the loss of the chick, I was glad to see that things were going okay with some of the eggs.

Earlier in the incubation period I held the eggs up to a flashlight beam and saw the eye spot and some blood vessels developing.  Now I see a dark blob in the eggs.  Eggs without a developing embryo are translucent.  Seeing the eye spots and blood vessels develop within the egg was nearly as exciting as seeing my own babies on ultrasound.  Okay maybe not quite that exciting, but seeing new life is miraculous!  Plus, I don’t have to be pregnant to see this life happen

Check out the video of the hen here on YouTube, and, as long as there is no disaster, I hope to share a video of chicks hatching within the next couple of days.  I put them under her on July 29; it takes 21 days for the chicks to hatch, so we expect babies within the next couple of days.  Maybe they will be here for the eclipse; we are in an area of totality and I also hope to share a video of my chickens going to roost in the middle of the day.

 

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The Easter Egg Hunt was Early This Year Thanks to Chicken Antics

One of my Americana hens decided
she wants to be a mama.  Lacking a
rooster husband, she will not be able to fulfill her dream, but her chicken
brain does not realize this minor detail will prevent motherhood.  Her desires led us on an early Easter
egg hunt for her beautiful blue-green eggs. 


She stopped laying eggs during the fall, but in mid-January,
I saw her sitting on the nest inside the coop,  and I planned to check on her later to see if she
had laid an egg.  She let me know about her
egg-laying success with a cacophony of cackling that went on so long I checked on her to
make sure she was okay.  Unlike the
peaceful clucking depicted in children’s books, this was a cackle, a “BA-aaaCK!”
which she repeated for five or ten minutes until she was sure all the other chickens
knew about her egg.
I keep them inside a portable fence, made of electrified netting, that I move regularly.  I don’t let them free range because of the threat of predators and the mess they create.

My chicken was proud of her egg, so proud that on subsequent
days, she flew out of the pen by flapping her way from the roof of the house
across the fence and away from the other chickens to roam the yard to find
places to lay her eggs.   My daughters
came looking for me, yelling, “There’s a chicken under the playhouse!”  Because of the low clearance under the
structure, we couldn’t get her out, and I told them she’d leave when she was
ready to leave.  I looked for eggs, and
couldn’t see any under there.  For weeks,
this hen got out of the pen nearly every day. 
 I should have trimmed her wings
but I never managed to find the time to clip the flight feathers, which does
not hurt the chicken, to keep her from flying over the fence.
One reason I don’t let my chickens freely range is that they make a mess of the flowerbeds

After yet another escape a few weeks ago, I looked under the
playhouse and saw a cache of eggs.  At
first, I thought there were five or so, but as I removed them, I kept seeing
more eggs.  Eventually I removed 13 eggs
from under the playhouse, making it the most exciting egg hunt I have ever
attended.  My daughters enjoyed seeing
the enlarging pile of eggs, colored a perfect Easter egg blue.
Some of the eggs I nestled among the blooming thrift as if hidden for Easter

When chickens decide to go “broody,” or decide they want to
hatch some babies, they collect eggs in a nest until they believe they have
enough, and then they sit on the eggs for the several weeks it takes to hatch
the eggs.  My hen hadn’t accumulated
enough eggs to suit her, apparently, because she left the nest to return to her
house after she laid the eggs.


It doesn’t matter to the hen if there is a rooster or not,
but of course the eggs won’t hatch unless a rooster fertilizes them.  Maybe, when my girls are old enough to escape
an angry rooster, we’ll get one.  Seeing
the life cycle would be interesting.


Everyone wants to know if we ate the eggs.  We tested their freshness by putting them in
a glass of water; if they sink, they are fresh, and if they float, they are not
fresh.  All the eggs sank, and we are eating
them.  It was winter when this happened,
and although we’ve had some cold nights we have had plenty of days in the
sixties and seventies. 


Eggs are designed to hatch, and the chicken won’t sit on
them regularly until she’s accumulated a pile of sufficient number, so the eggs
from which chickens hatch under natural circumstances may have sat in their
Mama’s nest for weeks before she began to incubate them.  In modern agriculture, where farmers ship
eggs across the country by tractor-trailer, constant refrigeration is
necessary.

My hen is now back inside her pen with the other chickens.  I enlarged the pen and moved the house away
from the fence, and she seems content.  I
remove all the eggs every day; she’s less likely to try to have more babies
than if she were able to keep eggs in a nest. 
 Of course, with chickens, you
just never know what they will do next. 
The escaped chicken, returned home and dust-bathing
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I Don’t Think I Will Eat My Chickens

My husband, Scott, and I have had many discussions about the
fate of my chickens once they stop laying eggs. 
We bought nine chickens, assuming that a couple of them would die in the
hands of an inexperienced chicken-keeper, but they all lived.  When I bought them at the feed store, they
were a couple of weeks old, so the weakest chicks in the batch had probably
already died. 

My fortified chicken coop has kept predators away, although
I am aware that one could gain entrance any night, especially if the power goes
out to the portable electronet fencing.  We
deliberately did not name the chickens, although I didn’t know how I’d feel
about eating the chickens after they quit laying, because I don’t need more
pets to live in my house and require veterinary care.  I have two very spoiled dachshunds. 

A Barred Plymouth Rock and a Buff Orpington chicken finishing off the pea crop

I told Scott that some of them would probably die of natural
causes anyway, and he said, not, I don’t think, intending it to be a
compliment, “The way you take care of those chickens they’ll live
forever.”   I make sure they have fresh food and water,
and clean ground to explore as often as possible.  I love seeing any creature doing what they
were meant to do, which in the case of chickens is scratching for bugs and
tidbits of food on the ground.  They
scratch first with one foot, then the other. 
Their eyes are on the sides of their heads so they must turn their heads
to the side to see the ground, and they search the ground for something to eat,
peck at it, and move on. 

They love loose, dry soil, and they dig out a hole, scratch
dirt into their feathers, wiggle and adjust their feathers to move the dirt
about, and bask in the sun while taking a dust bath.  They are unhappy when, after a rain, there is
no dry dirt in which to bathe.   Watching
contented chickens is like seeing children playing, deeply involved in some
imaginative game of their own invention that does not rely on electronics or
cartoon characters, or a dog snuggled in his bed asleep before a fire.   And just because the chickens are not pets,
it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t make them happy and give them opportunities to do
what they’d do if they weren’t in captivity. 
They love fresh green grass this time of year, and they rush towards the
new grass made available when I move their pen.

Chickens, when allowed to experience natural cycles of light
and dark, lay fewer eggs as the days shorten. 
Their bodies are very sensitive to daylight and to darkness; as the days
shorten when the Winter Solstice approaches later this month, they lay fewer
eggs, and as the days lengthen as the Summer Solstice approaches in June, they
lay more eggs.  During the summer, they
laid seven eggs almost every day; recently, I have been getting up to four eggs
daily.

The eggs we get are plenty for us even during the winter,
but some chicken-keepers keep a light on in the coop for part of the night to
make the chickens continue to lay eggs. 
In commercial chicken houses, where farmers keep chickens in cages so
small they cannot spread their wings, the lights are on all the time to trick
the chickens into laying constantly.   If you buy your eggs at the farmers market,
expect the farmer to have fewer eggs in the winter; get there early to purchase
yours.  Chickens also molt, during which
time they lose their feathers, regrow new ones, and cease laying entirely
before resuming laying a couple of months later.

Scott says he wants to put them in the stew pot when they
stop laying eggs in a few years.  I doubt
I will be able to eat a creature I have taken care of daily for so long, and I do
not know if he would be able to either. 
I know that my grandparents would laugh at that notion, but I didn’t
grow up eating chickens from the yard as they did, either, and my family will
not go hungry if we don’t eat the chickens. 

I won’t take them to the veterinarian if they become sick, although
I won’t allow them to suffer, but until they die of natural causes, I’ll give
them the best care possible.  Maybe we’ll
get some more chickens that we will designate as birds for meat from the
beginning, and we’ll harvest them when they are a few months old, before
they’ve been around very long. 


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Adventures with Snakes and Chickens

I had not seen any snakes this summer, and I thought I was fortunate not to encounter them, or any other wildlife, in my chicken pen. My good fortune began to change after a discussion one night earlier this month at the book club of which I am a member.  All the ladies shared their snake encounters and I, somewhat smugly, realized I had no story to share. 


When I arrived home that night and went to check on the chickens, no eggs were in the nest.  I found that odd, and gently scolded my lazy chickens as I plucked them from their perch on the roof of the chicken tractor, where they like to roost when it’s hot outside, and began to put them inside the chicken tractor for their safety.  Then, in the dim flashlight beam, I noticed a black snake slithering among the nine pairs of chicken legs on the roof and off the side of the tractor.  The chickens were in the usual almost-comatose state they enter after dark, and the one the snake nearly knocked off the roof as he exited didn’t even notice.  I ran to the house to get my husband, Scott, who said, “What do you want me to do? I know you don’t want me to kill it.”  I replied, “I don’t know, but you should just be out there with me!”


I am not afraid of snakes, but I respect them and I want them to tend to their snake business away from me. The snake sped under a gap underneath the electrified netting fence, and Scott and I arrived just in time to see it disappear under his man shed.  We looked for it, and our plan was to catch it and release it somewhere far away from any chickens if we saw it again.  Black snakes are helpful to have around because they control rodents, and are not poisonous, but I couldn’t have one eating my eggs.


A week or two later, my neighbor found two large timber rattlesnakes in her yard, and as far as I know, had them killed.  I would have killed them if they were in my yard too because of the danger they pose to people and pets. 


On Sunday afternoon, I checked on the chickens and noticed that the nest egg, a large wooden white egg from my daughter’s play kitchen I put in the nesting box to encourage the chickens to lay their eggs there instead of on the ground, was missing.  I lifted the straw on one of the nesting boxes, thinking the chickens might have buried the nesting egg, and found a large black snake curled in the box.  It had a bulge just the size of the nest egg, which is larger than a normal egg, in its body.  If a snake can smell the eggs and come from the woods into the chicken tractor after the eggs, I do not know why he can’t tell the difference between a real egg and a wooden one.   I suppose I scared the snake as much as he scared me, and that’s why he didn’t bite me.  I dropped the straw and ran to get Scott. 


Again, Scott wondered why I was bothering him, but I told him that because as far as I knew, snakes could not digest wooden eggs, the humane thing to do was to kill the snake instead of letting it suffer, and that snake killing was definitely his job.  My daughter, Ella, 5, wanted to see what was going on, so I showed her the snake and explained to her that the snake had eaten her wooden egg and we’d have to kill it so it wouldn’t suffer.    


My grandparents always kept a good sharp hoe around for snake killing, but I lack a suitable one, or at least could not locate it in the melee.  The snake was coiled inside the nesting box, and inside the chicken tractor, so hoe chopping was not possible.  Scott used a shovel.  I let the fence down to encourage the chickens to leave the area, but they preferred to see what we were doing in their house.  As the snake killing progressed, I had to shooing them away to keep them from pecking at the snake and possibly becoming victim of a misplaced shovel-blow. 


Scott managed to kill the snake without destroying the chicken tractor, although there are a few new holes in the plastic siding.  It is surprisingly hard to kill a snake in a nesting box.  He left me the job of burying the snake.  After I answered all of Ella’s questions about the snake’s death and showed her the dead snake, at her request, she said she did not want the egg back.  I buried the snake, containing the wooden egg, in a gully. The chickens seem very unconcerned about the entire experience, I tried to fortify the chicken tractor further against snakes, and I will scatter mothballs around our property as a snake repellent.  I have also designated a sharp bush axe as the future weapon of choice to use against snakes inside the chicken tractor. 

A few days later, I smelled dead snake and discovered that some animal had dug up the snake, and, apparently possessing more intelligence than the snake, had eaten the snake but had left the wooden nest egg in the woods nearby.  I also left the nest egg, which reeked of dead snake, on the forest floor, but I covered it with some leaves to reduce the odor.  Ella did not want it back.