It’s easy, when thinking about chicken behavior, to assume that the rules of the game are hard-and-fast, and therefore equally applicable to one and all. Easy, but wrong, because each hen, like each person, is an individual.
I was reminded of this fact while mulling the egg-laying behavior of our two hens, Nellie and Hope. More about them in a minute.
The consensus among experts seems to be that hens, once they start laying at about six months of age or so, are most productive during their first years of life. After that, their productivity drops, and often stops entirely.
“A healthy, well-cared-for hen should lay well (nearly daily when she's not molting, broody, too hot or not getting enough hours of daylight) for about two to three years,” according to the Fresh Eggs Daily web site, “and then her production will start to taper off.”
True enough, but egg laying may offer the ultimate proof that individual differences are an important fact of life on Planet Chicken.
Nellie and Hope are Rhode Island Reds. Both were hatched in January 2013. Both were shipped to us at the same time from the same hatchery. They arrived as pullets, by mail, in May 2013, sharing a ventilated box.
So you might think these two chickens would be poster hens for consistency in the laying department, but you’d be wrong. Sure enough, both began laying in the summer of 2013, and continued to do so on a predictable basis until the summer of 2016.
That’s when Hope, for no obvious reason other than, possibly, age, simply stopped laying. The number of eggs she has produced in the two years since then could be counted on one hand, yet she appears to be perfectly healthy in all respects.
Nellie, on the other hand, remains a good layer, even though she is now more than five years old. At this time of year, with its greater exposure to daylight, she produces an impressive number of eggs every month. In fact, she rarely goes more than a day without laying, and often lays two or three days in a row, sometimes even four days at a stretch.
So both “girls” have defied convention. Hope might have been expected to continue laying through this point in her life, albeit at a slower pace than before. Instead, she has shut things down. And Nellie, at her age, might have been expected to lay fewer eggs than she did initially. Instead, her production line is humming along at a good clip.
I was reminded of this fact while mulling the egg-laying behavior of our two hens, Nellie and Hope. More about them in a minute.
The consensus among experts seems to be that hens, once they start laying at about six months of age or so, are most productive during their first years of life. After that, their productivity drops, and often stops entirely.
“A healthy, well-cared-for hen should lay well (nearly daily when she's not molting, broody, too hot or not getting enough hours of daylight) for about two to three years,” according to the Fresh Eggs Daily web site, “and then her production will start to taper off.”
True enough, but egg laying may offer the ultimate proof that individual differences are an important fact of life on Planet Chicken.
Nellie and Hope are Rhode Island Reds. Both were hatched in January 2013. Both were shipped to us at the same time from the same hatchery. They arrived as pullets, by mail, in May 2013, sharing a ventilated box.
So you might think these two chickens would be poster hens for consistency in the laying department, but you’d be wrong. Sure enough, both began laying in the summer of 2013, and continued to do so on a predictable basis until the summer of 2016.
That’s when Hope, for no obvious reason other than, possibly, age, simply stopped laying. The number of eggs she has produced in the two years since then could be counted on one hand, yet she appears to be perfectly healthy in all respects.
Nellie, on the other hand, remains a good layer, even though she is now more than five years old. At this time of year, with its greater exposure to daylight, she produces an impressive number of eggs every month. In fact, she rarely goes more than a day without laying, and often lays two or three days in a row, sometimes even four days at a stretch.
So both “girls” have defied convention. Hope might have been expected to continue laying through this point in her life, albeit at a slower pace than before. Instead, she has shut things down. And Nellie, at her age, might have been expected to lay fewer eggs than she did initially. Instead, her production line is humming along at a good clip.
When it comes to rules, chickens know one thing as well as we humans do: they're meant to be broken.
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