Surviving Winter

It's been awhile. Longer than I realized. Plenty of things chicken and non-chicken related have happened between last fall and now. I won't bore you with all the details, but I'll hit a few of the chicken related highlights.

This winter we went an insane amount of time without eggs. I actually had to buy eggs. Twice. It was horrible. It was the first time I bought eggs since owning chickens. Ir resulted in frequent verbal threats on the flock for over a month. I kept telling them how delicious they looked and questioned why I was feeding them if they couldn't produce me any deliciousness. After awhile I gave up and left them to their own devices. Like everyone else in the country, we had a hard winter. We got more snow than we have in years and I'm sure the girls were using all their energy to stay warm. I'm happy to say we're back into fairly regular production mode now.

We're getting an egg or two a day, so I'm happy. I have all the makings for a delicious quiche this week, so I'm a happy Chicken Lady.

Our girls are not a fan of the winter. They hate the snow. During our first snow, some of the girls came out of the coop in the morning, walked around, looked at the snow, then turned right back around and headed back into the coop. They said screw this mess. We're done here. They kept pretty short outside hours. I can't blame them. It has been freezing out there. The second snow didn't seem to shock them as much. They spent a little more time outside, but it warmed up fairly quickly and the snow was gone a  few days later. I'm sure they were relieved. I sure was and I don't spend the majority of my time outside.

Everything is holding up well despite the weather. There are only a few little adjustments that need to be made to the coop and our chicken equipment. The locks we were using on the human-sized door to the run rusted out, so we've got carabiners taking their place. We stopped actually locking the locks quite awhile ago, years ago actually, so the carabiners may be a permanent replacement. They keep the door latched and that's what we need. I'd like to clean up the boards over the nest boxes, but only for appearance sake. They're a little frankenstein looking right now as my husband slapped a few boards up on a slant to put a stop to the girls sleeping on and pooping all over the flat board that was originally on top of the nesting boxes. The slanted board keeps them off, but it looks hideous. Maybe one day we'll get around to fixing that up. Otherwise, all we've got to replace is their big waterer. It's metal and after almost four years it's starting to rust. What can you expect? With any kind of animals you have to replace that kind of stuff every now and then.

The sad news about our flock is that we recently lost Pouncey, the beautiful Ameraucana that turned out to be more of a mutt with a beard. One day my husband when out to let the girls have some free range time in the yard and found her hunkered down in one of the corners where they take dust baths. When he noticed her feathers bowing in the wind, he knew something was up. He picked her up to see if she was okay only to find that she had passed away probably sometime that morning.

She was my favorite. Out of our three original girls, she was mine. I named her. I thought she was such a beautiful chicken. And I'll miss her.

On the bright side, this means I'm on the hunt for another chicken (or two) this spring. I've always wanted a blue or green egg-layer. Maybe I'll finally get one this year. I'm sure some people think I sound horrible jumping from my favorite chicken dying to my want for more chickens. The fact of the matter is chickens die. Pouncey lived a great life. She had plenty to eat. She had lots of time to free range and explore the yard. She was around other chickens. She lived a much better life than a lot of chickens who are slapped into tiny cages and do nothing but lay eggs for a year before they're culled to make room for the next younger, better egg layer. Our chickens are pets, but they're still chickens and they're still part of the life cycle. I can be happy knowing I gave her a good life. Now it's time for me to give some more chickens a good life.

Until then, good Chicken People.

Winter Eggs

We're usually in a horribly tight spot when it comes to eggs throughout the winter. Last year I went into a tirade about how I refused to buy eggs from the grocery store when I had perfectly good laying machines in my backyard. I may have even gone as far as to threaten our hens with the oven if they didn't get to it. Don't get me wrong; I understand that egg production drops in the winter. Does that mean I like it. No. Does that mean I enjoy getting two eggs a week? No. But, I also understand that it's important for chickens to have a break. I'd want a break too if I popped an egg out of my butt once a day.

This winter has been different. We had an early drop in eggs around November. The girls all seemed to molt early, so they stopped laying early. We were barely getting any eggs for easily two months. December egg laying was abysmal. Then January hit and the girls starting laying like it was April or May.

We're getting four eggs from our five hens about every other day. The other days we'll either get one or two. It seems Ocho is the only one who realizes it's still winter. I don't think she's laying yet. If she is, it's so infrequent that I can't tell she is. We've got a dozen eggs in the fridge right now. At one point last week I think we were nearly at two dozen. That's an egg miracle in January.

Now that we're launching into February and Punxsutawney Phil didn't see his shadow, we might even get up to five eggs a day! With our extra girl this year we're going to have even more eggs that we don't know what to do with. Belle, our newest edition, has been an excellent layer so far. She's our first girl to ever start laying in January; the others all waited until spring.

As for last winter, after my tirade I kept my promise not to buy eggs. I haven't purchased a single egg since our hens started laying. Now, did I make a quiche or a frittata last winter? You bet I didn't. But I didn't have to buy any eggs either! You have to bend to your supply.

So cheers to an early spring and delicious eggs. Now why have I only gotten this one egg today? They're just trying to prove me wrong. Freaking chickens.

Chocolate Eggs

Our coop is starting the new year off right. Belle's comb had been increasingly reddened lately and I'd started stalking her in anticipation of her first egg. (If you haven't tuned in lately, Belle is the Marans hen that we hatched this summer). Yesterday she laid her first chocolate egg!

We started off yesterday's especially cold morning with Belle squawking the morning announcement. Our girls generally get loud for only two reasons: they've either laid an egg or they've been spooked and they're sounding an alarm. I was crossing my fingers for reason number one, so I rushed to the coop to look for an egg. No luck. I'm sure you're confused now because I just got done saying she laid her first egg. Stay with me here.

Later in the afternoon, my husband had to kick Belle out of the coop a number of times while he was cleaning. As soon as he was done, she jumped right in there and got to sitting. I'm not sure how long she was in the nest box, but it felt like forever. You can believe that as soon as she came out of the coop, I ran right to the egg door and found a tiny chocolate-colored starter egg.

For any newbies out there, a starter egg is what people call the first egg a chicken ever lays. It's usually pretty tiny; it's Mother Nature's way of easing hens into laying. Over the next few weeks or month as she lays more frequently, her eggs will start increasing in size until they even off to be the size she'll continue to lay for the rest of her egg laying years. As with any newly laying hen, she'll also lay pretty infrequently over the next few weeks; though I suspect she may lay infrequently for the next month or two until we emerge from winter.

Belle's egg is on the left. On the right is an egg from Pouncey, one of our other girls.

She's the only hen we've raised so far who's started laying in the middle of January. Our other hens held off until spring. Maybe she'll be a super layer. I've seen Marans described as medium layers, but I've also seen some of the other breeds we have listed as medium layers and they lay tons of eggs. Egg laying seems pretty relative to your situation and particular birds in my experience, so I'm hoping Belle will be like our other girls and lay eggs like crazy. We feed them enough deliciousness to keep them happy that they ought to lay plenty of eggs.

Her one tiny egg is pretty promising, but when you're in the days of only a few eggs a week, a new layer is monumental. Add in the awesome new egg color, and we're suddenly in egg heaven. My husband couldn't help himself and fried up that tiny egg this morning. Apparently it was delicious on toast. Too bad it wasn't wrapped in actual chocolate like those Cadbury eggs. I could go for one of those every now and again. I'd probably get sick of them after getting four or five a week for six months, so never mind on the chocolate. I'll stick with the chocolate-colored ones.

It's All in the Egg

Of course, any person who has been in a grocery store knows that hens lay different sizes of eggs. Some hens lay large eggs, which some lay medium-sized eggs and some lay small eggs. And everyone knows that eggs come in different colors. The standard grocery store eggs are either brown or white. Chicken aficionados know that eggs can also come in olive, chocolate brown, and varying shades of blue, green and pink. You might find it interesting to know that hens also lay eggs of different shapes. We can tell which of our hens has laid which egg when we collect them from the nest boxes. It helps that we only have four laying hens at the moment. Though it won't be hard when the youngest two start laying because they're bantams and will lay tiny white eggs -  not hard to distinguish from the larger brow eggs we're already getting.

You might be wondering how chickens can lay different shaped eggs. Well, it's not like one hen lays oval-shaped eggs and another lays rectangular eggs. Except for that one time, but maybe I'll save that one for another post. An egg is shaped based on the passageway out of the hen. Some eggs are narrow, some are pointy, some are quite round, and some are just odd looking. Seeing is believing, so here are examples of our girls and their delicious, yet differently-shaped eggs.

Meet Bossy. She's a Barred Rock. Some might call her a Plymouth Rock.

She lays large brown eggs. They are always the biggest of our four hens' eggs. Though the others are catching up in size.

Next, meet Pouncey. I call her an Ameraucana, but she is more accurately a mutt. She's an Easter Egger crossbred with something else.

Pouncey's eggs are a little smaller than Bossy's and are severely oval in shape. They're sometimes almost pointy at the top. They're lighter in color too. Lately, they've gotten a bit larger and are getting almost too similar to Bossy's to tell them apart.



Then there's Erickson, named by my son after his best friend. She's a fluffy and fat buff Brahma. Her eggs are fat. They have a roundish shape to them.

Last, but not least, we have Ochocinco. She's an Iowa Blue that's probably got a little something else mixed in there too.

She's was making quite a loud barking noise when this photograph was taken. That's how she rolls. Her eggs are the smallest of the four girls. They are cute and little. Her eggs usually have little raised spots all over them. They're little buildups of calcium. Apparently, this trait is hereditary. 

It's interesting how varied eggs are. What you see in the grocery store is a mass-marketed product of what someone decided was egg "perfection." Wouldn't it be cool to go to the store and be able to buy chocolate brown or pastel blue eggs? Or there could be like a grab bag carton that had a variety of colors, sizes and shapes. I'd buy them. Well, I'd buy them if my own hens weren't laying me a third of a dozen eggs a day nearly for free.