Hen Chronicles: Well now, that didn't work out as planned

After four years of keeping chickens, another first!

Our three hens were very agitated when I released them from the coop yesterday morning. Snow, Nellie and even the normally late-rising Hope raced out into the pen, where they stood around on alert instead of digging into their breakfast, as they normally do.

When I lifted the coop’s roof to clean out the night’s deposits, another surprise emerged. The bedding in the nest box, where the hens lay their eggs, was very wet, which was odd.

All of “the girls” stopped laying last year at the end of November, as chickens often do when the days grow short. Yet judging by the wet bedding, at least one of them obviously had spent time in the nest box recently. Could it mean the winter hiatus had come to an end? It seemed unlikely, because there were no clear signs that anyone had laid an egg, not even bits of shell amid the bedding. 

The solution to the mystery emerged after I lowered the roof and squatted down outside the pen to examine the hens.

Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds, looked quite normal, physically. Not so Snow, our white Plymouth Rock. The right side of her chest was stained a bright yellow, and her breast feathers were wet. Nellie and Hope gently pecked at Snow's chest from time to time, as if they were eating.

The conclusion seemed obvious. Snow had produced an egg without a shell, and she sat down on it in such a way that the yolk smeared on her breast. Later, one of the hens -- or maybe all of them -- chowed down on the tasty mess. The hens had disposed of most of the evidence by the time I cleaned the coop, leaving behind nothing but wet bedding in the nest box, and Snow's new color scheme.

Over the last four years, I’ve found broken eggs in the coop. I've found spongy eggs with shells so soft that they broke when touched. But an egg sans a shell? This was something new. For me, anyway. Turns out there's plenty of online chatter about this sort of thing, though, so it isn't unheard of.

Hens need a lot of calcium to produce eggs with firm shells. Too little calcium is the most likely explanation for soft or shell-less eggs. I started giving the chickens crushed oyster shells — an edible source of extra calcium — on Monday, figuring they might get back to "work" any day now. Apparently I was right about the timing of the 2016 startup, but wrong about when to reintroduce a calcium supplement. Sooner probably would have been better.

We washed Snow’s chest with a wet cloth, and dried her off. The extra attention seemed to please her; she was very calm as I held her while Liz tidied her up. As for the daily breakfast menu, it has been expanded. In addition to the customary pellets and water, it now includes a side of calcium. On the house.