Hen Chronicles: "The girls" don't read reference books

It’s a good thing our hens don’t read reference books, because their egg output might drop off.

The experts tell us that egg production slumps during the shorter days of winter, unless a coop has artificial lighting, which ours does not. Conventional wisdom has it that a hen needs 14 hours of daylight, or its equivalent from artificial sources, to lay an egg. So if a hen gets, say, a mere 10 hours of light a day during the winter, she’ll skip a day of laying because she won’t hit that 14th hour until the next day.

For the most part, this seems to hold true with our hens, Snow and Nala. In January, we typically got one egg per day. Not one per hen, but one between the two of them. This is less than during the warm-weather months.

That makes sense if “the girls” accumulate a full 14 hours of light exposure on alternating days because of slight variations in their internal time-keeping gizmos. In other words, if Snow reaches the 14-hour mark on a Monday and Nala gets there on a Tuesday, Snow will lay an egg on Monday and Nala will do so on Tuesday. And so it goes for the rest of the week, leaving us with an egg a day.

But several times in the last month or so, things played out differently. In each case, we got one egg one day, followed by two eggs the next day. So at least one of the chickens occasionally ignores the 14-hour rule by laying an egg on two consecutive days, even though we only get about 9.5 hours of light per day at this time of the year.

Go figure.

I was about to praise the girls for not playing by the rules, but then I thought better of it. Their ignorance is our bliss . . . at the breakfast table.