Snow, our oldest, most pugnacious hen, the one we think of as the flock’s problem child because of her penchant for mishaps and misadventures, is back in the game.
The egg-laying game, that is.
It’s been a long wait.
One day in mid-September of last year, Snow freaked out, as chickens are wont to do when frightened. (Remember Chicken Little?) I can't really blame her. She lost it during the very noisy demolition of a house near our lot. In the process, Snow somehow managed to sever part of the comb from her head, leaving her soaked in blood and forcing us to isolate her in a separate pen to recuperate, once we stanched the bleeding and cleaned her up.
Snow flew solo, as it were, for almost three weeks before she was well enough to be reunited with Nellie and Hope. During her exile, our lone Plymouth Rock hen continued to lay eggs, but all that changed right about the time she rejoined the rest of our tiny flock at the beginning of October.
After that, nothing.
During all of October, Snow produced no eggs. Ditto November, as well as December, January and February. For much of that time, she was molting, discarding old feathers and replacing them with new ones. That, combined with the advent of winter, can cause hens to stop laying, as Nellie and Hope did for more than two months.
Still, as more and more time passed with no eggs from Snow, I feared that her laying days were over, that she might have gone into retirement. (She’s more than three years old.) But my wife Liz insisted all along that Snow would come around as spring approached. Nellie and Hope, who stopped laying in early December, began laying again last week, and Liz was convinced that Snow, known in the past for her unusually large eggs, would follow suit.
She was right.
Monday morning, I found two normal-sized eggs in the nest box, obviously the work of our two Rhode Island Reds. Then, that afternoon, Liz retrieved another egg from the coop. A third egg. A very big egg.
Three hens. Three eggs. All in one day. That’s one egg per hen, because it takes a day or more for a chicken to produce and lay a single egg.
After a five-month hiatus, Snow was earning her keep once again. I should have had more faith in her.
No comments:
Post a Comment