Egg detective

A a couple of weeks ago we stopped getting the regular 3 to 4 a day we'd been pulling out of the nest box. At first I thought, the girls are still young so they may just be laying sporadically. But when this went on for a couple of days, with only one or two eggs in the nest a day, I decided to start looking around to see if they were laying somewhere else. We let them out of their coop and run area almost every day to roam our two yards freely, so they have a lot of options for hiding a nest. I walked around the yards looking in corners and behind grassy areas and finally found a nest well-hidden behind a small stand of monkey grass next to a privacy fence with seven eggs in it.

The next day we got three eggs in the nest box and one in the hiding place. Then after a couple of days we were down to just two eggs a day in the nest box and none in the hidden nest by the fence. I made a cursory search around the yards in the areas we know they spend time and found nothing. Today I got serious and made an intensive search and found this:

I'm thinking, based on the count of eggs and days, that there may be a couple of eggs out there I haven't found yet, but I'm almost looking forward to the continued search. It's like Easter!

I count to five, second installment

When Esmeralda came to us we figured out she had an eating disorder. She ate whatever got in her way, including precisely what was bad for her. Her crop was blocked up when we got her so we did the on-line research and started following the suggestions of people more experienced than us, which, at the time, was everybody. We fed her only soft food, yogurt or buttermilk with oatmeal or corn meal softened to mush, until she became active again and then tried her on dry grains for a while, until she seemed sick and sluggish again. We massaged her crop enough to be familiar with its normal size and its blocked size. We went through cycles of soft food and grain until we decided whatever was blocking her crop had to come out or we would be feeding her yogurt on our porch for her entire life.

This is when we researched crop surgery. Joan and I picked a day that we would both be home to keep an eye on her and set up an operating table on a kitchen counter. It was nerve-wrecking because we were afraid of hurting her or even killing her. She was more pet than farm animal. But we also knew the blocked crop could eventually kill her so we were willing to take the risk.

We covered her head with a towel, and she became still and quiet almost immediately. I held her, and Joan cut open her crop with a sterilized razor blade. The mess that came out of her was gross. There was lots of straw surrounded by yogurt and oatmeal. Now we at least knew what she was eating that was blocking her. We cleaned out everything we could get out of her crop, and I stitched her back up. I wrapped her in a towel and sat on the porch holding her while Joan cleaned up. I was a wreck. I think Joan was, too. Esmeralda was quiet and still and very small. Joan brought me a glass of wine. The stress of the surgery had worn me out. I finally put her down in the nest we had made for her using shredded paper. After a while she perked up a little and we fed her some yogurt. She lived on the porch and ate yogurt for a couple of days, then yogurt with oatmeal until we decided she was strong enough to go out to the coop with the chicks.

We probably should have taken all the straw out of the coop then, but I guess we thought the straw-eating was a fluke. We enjoyed warm sunny days sitting beside the garden or the coop watching the chicks play and taking pictures like crazy, doting parents. As we watched I began to realize that Esmeralda still wasn’t particularly discriminating about what she ate. I caught her sucking down a strand I had snipped off a tomato plant, got to her before she got it all down and pulled several inches of tender stalk and leaf out of her throat. Later I snatched a piece of straw out of her beak, and I figured it probably wasn’t her first. Our next project was to clean all the straw out of the coop and replace it with wood shavings. But by this point it was obvious that her crop was blocked again.

We thought ourselves experienced by this time and decided to skip all the intermediary steps and go right to crop surgery. It was stressful this time, but we had learned a few things from the first experience, and we felt more confident. Esmeralda recovered nicely again and went back to live happily in the straw-free coop.

I count to five, four Bantam Easter Egger chicks and a New Hampshire Red

[This is the first installment of a longer piece I've been working on about our first year with chickens.]

My career as a chicken farmer started when I ordered 5 bantams from mypetchicken.com. I ordered them in June to arrive around September 1. At the time I didn’t think about them still being young in the coldest part of winter. For a couple of months after I ordered them, we thought about and read about chicks and chickens. With a few weeks to go, Joan started building the coop.

Before the coop was finished we acquired our first chicken. A friend with chickens had one that was sickly and the rest of the flock picked on her. She was a very pretty, sweet chicken, a Salmon Favarolle, so we took her and set her up on the screened porch until the coop was ready. She had a straw nest and rocking chairs to roost on. The chicks came while she was living out there so we had five new, one day old chicks living in a Rubbermaid tub and Esmeralda (yes, we named her) all living on the porch.

Once Esmeralda started feeling better she jumped up on our legs and roosted on our shoulders when we sat on the porch. We fell in love with her because of the noises she made when she sat on our shoulders. It was one of the most relaxing things I’ve experienced. We called it chicken therapy. Our two small dogs didn’t understand why they couldn’t go on the porch with us any more. We finally decided to start exposing the dogs to the chicken and chicks and they all got along pretty well with supervision.

Four of us are co-chicken-parents: Joan and I, and our neighbors and best friends, Jan and Colleen. Our yards are joined so our dogs, there are six total, have more room to run. Their back yard has more open space, so the vegetable garden and chicken coop are there. We have always cared for each other’s pets and when we ordered pet chickens, it was a joint decision. Between the four of us, it seems like one of us is home most of the time.

The bantam chicks came in the mail to the post office. Jan went with me to pick them up. It was so much fun seeing the reactions of the postal workers and the other patrons when we picked up the little cheeping package. There was a family there with two little girls, and I couldn’t resist showing off my babies to the girls.

At home we put them in the nest we had created for them with straw, newspaper and a Rubbermaid tub. I immediately started taking pictures with my phone to send to Joan who was at work. They had brooding lamp to keep them warm and practically full-time attention from four doting “moms”. I’ve heard it for years from parents, so often it sounds trite, but they grew up so fast! Within a few days, it seems like, they started growing tiny feathers on their butts and then on their itty bitty wings. They went from golf-balled sized fuzz balls to little birds, and then they started looking like chickens. Since they are bantams they never got very big, but they grew! It seemed like everyday when we came home from work they had grown more. They got too big for the first tub I’d put them in, and I had to move them to a larger one.

When the chicks were four weeks old we moved them, all six, to the finished coop. I counted to five then because the little ones all ran around in a pack. When I watched them play I automatically began counting in my head. If one wasn’t with the rest I had to keep looking to finish my count. We put them in the fenced vegetable garden to roam and scratch. Esmeralda was always a little off to the side in her own world. When they got big enough one of the bantams would occasionally fly to the top of the fence and think about escaping. Eventually they could simply fly over the fence and one of us jumped up to chase them back in. We took all the chairs that used to be on the deck and moved them into the yard where we could watch the chicken antics. We sat by the garden one day and named all of the bantams.

Xena (after the Warrior Princess) was the most aggressive. Lily had a widow’s peak design on her head that reminded us of Lily Munster. Lola was all black and the inspiration for her name would take too much explanation. The two “blondes”, two beige girls with salmon and silver highlights, took longer. One we named Gabrielle for Xena’s sidekick. The other had more silver around her head so we named her Emmylou for one of our favorite country musicians.