Hen Chronicles: The ultimate sign that spring has sprung

It isn’t really a miracle, of course. But when you finally spot a fresh egg in the coop for the first time in six months, it certainly feels like one.

Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds, hatched in January 2013, which makes them over six years old. At least one expert whose work I’ve consulted says hens generally stop laying, on a regular basis anyway, at about six years of age, although they may continue to produce eggs sporadically after that.

So we would have been disappointed, but not surprised, if Nellie and Hope had called it quits in the laying department. In fact, there’s some reason to believe Hope hasn’t laid since last spring. The final egg of 2018 — presumably, Nellie’s — made its appearance in September, with nary a sighting since then.

Until this morning.

It’s usually an exaggeration when people say something startled them so much they did a double take, but I did just that when I lifted my “poop bucket” into the coop at dawn, so I could clean things up. I’ve grown so accustomed to finding nothing but waste among the pine shavings on the coop floor that I came within an inch or two of depositing the bucket right on top of . . . an egg!

I'm not getting my hopes up too much. It probably will be a slow year for eggs, what with the age of our two hens. But as today's little "miracle" made clear, at least one of "the girls" hasn’t given up just yet.

Hen Chronicles: Breaking the rules

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.
 

When it comes to rules, chickens know one thing as well as we humans do: they're meant to be broken.

Hen Chronicles: Is it a "witch egg," or just a seasonal glitch?

Last year, our little flock’s winter break came to an end on March 11. That's when one of our hens laid the first egg of 2017.

This year, the return to work began a day earlier. Nellie, one of our two Rhode Island Reds, took to the nest box yesterday morning and left behind the offering that’s pictured below.

Size wise, it isn’t very impressive, coming in at no more than two inches in length, and perhaps a bit shorter than that. In fact, it may be the smallest egg we’ve seen in almost six years of keeping chickens. But it’s a clean, unblemished, hard-shelled egg.

More importantly, it’s a harbinger of better days to come as spring draws near.

We’ve encountered this sort of thing before when the hens resume laying after a hiatus of several months. It may take a little while for their "equipment" to ramp back up. But we haven’t cracked the egg yet, so only time will tell if it’s just a tiny egg or something else -- what’s sometimes called a fairy egg, which is a small egg with no yolk. Fairy eggs are typically laid by pullets (young hens) that are new to the game, or by older hens that are slowing down. Nellie and Hope turned five in January, so they are neither young nor ancient.

“Fairy eggs occur when the hen's body begins to form an egg before a yolk is released from her oviduct,” according to fresheggsdaily.com. “Therefore, only the white (albumen) is encased inside the shell.” That’s the scientific explanation, but folks had different ideas in the Middle Ages. Back then, yolk-less eggs were known as witch eggs (because they were thought to be satanic) or cock eggs (because they were thought to have been laid by roosters).

As a species, we may not be as advanced as we'd like to believe, but in some ways, at least, we are more enlightened than our ancestors.

A witch egg? Or just plain tiny?

Hen Chronicles: Laying is Job One, even during coop cleanup

I dread giving the chicken coop a thorough cleaning, which I do twice a year, but not because it’s a dusty, wet, messy job. I clean four cats' litter boxes and scoop poop from the coop every morning, so I'm no stranger to messy jobs.

The thing is, I just hate having to lock our three hens outside while I remove all of the bedding from the coop, scrape off any fossilized deposits, scrub the floor and spray the interior walls with a water-and-vinegar solution, wipe the floor with rags to remove any excess liquid, and then wait for everything to dry out before adding fresh bedding and reopening the coop. But like it or not, yesterday was the day. The whole shebang took a good 90 minutes or more from start to finish.

Snow, Nellie and Hope did not approve of this ritual. They never do, partly because they aren't big fans of change. And if they're ready to lay while the coop is temporarily closed to all traffic, they can’t get to their nest boxes, which are in the coop. That means they have to “hold it,” which I believe they can do for a short while, or drop their cargo outside, in the pen or under the raised coop.

Either way, once the coop has been reopened, I have to stage a one-man egg hunt outside, to find out if any of the hens was desperate enough to embrace a change in venue while the nest boxes were off-limits. I came up empty-handed during yesterday’s search, which was a good thing. In the past, the hens have been known to lay in inaccessible spots when denied access to their boxes, forcing me to jury-rig a retrieval gizmo that lets me reach and role a wayward egg without breaking it.

Trust me. That's easier said than done. We're not talking hard-boiled eggs here.

Hen Chronicles: Cracking the case of the unexplained eggs

Our three hens finally solved a mystery for us yesterday. But one question remains unanswered.

Snow, Nellie and Hope took the winter off in the laying department. Nothing unusual there. Then the first egg of the new year showed up on March 11. We knew it was Nellie’s handiwork, because I spotted her in the nest box while she was doing the deed.
 
More eggs turned up as the month progressed, sometimes at the rate of two per day, meaning at least two of the hens were laying again. All of the eggs were similar in size, which suggested that all of them came from Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds. Snow, a Plymouth Rock, has always laid very large eggs, and none of these was big enough to carry her signature.

But a key fact argued against "the Reds" being the responsible parties. Hope stopped laying last June. At first we thought she might be sick, but she’s been acting normally in all other respects. Egg production slows down as hens age and may stop entirely; even though Hope is only four years old, we finally chalked up her behavior to early retirement.

So we had a mystery on our hands. This year’s eggs were too numerous to be the work of only one hen. But none of the eggs was large enough to be Snow’s doing. Yet Hope called it quits a long time ago. How to explain what was going on?

Yesterday, "the girls" provided an answer. Three eggs materialized in the nest box. Hope hadn't retired after all. She'd been on sabbatical from June into March, when she finally rejoined the workforce. And now Snow was back on the job as well, with her Texas-sized offerings. Three eggs. Three chickens. All of the hens were laying once again.

But as I said at the outset, one mystery remains. Why did Hope stop laying for nine consecutive months or so, only to start up again after a hiatus that was so long it stretched through three seasons? I have no idea. In five years of keeping chickens, we’ve never encountered this before. My research has turned up no answers.

Giorgio Morandi, an Italian artist, once said: “Everything is a mystery, ourselves, and all things both simple and humble.” Perhaps Hope is a case in point.

Hen Chronicles: They're starting to return to work

Back in the old days (say, 2013), our hens continued to lay eggs straight through the winter. They produced fewer of them then than during the warmer months, but they still did what hens do best, albeit at a slower pace.

Then, in the winter of 2014-15, they stopped. Completely. This wasn’t especially surprising, because hens need quite a bit of light (daylight and/or artificial light) to produce eggs, and we don’t light our coop. The surprising thing was not that they called it quits that winter, but that they had previously laid eggs even as the snow flew and the temperature plummeted.

I attribute that first work stoppage, and those that followed last winter and this winter as well, to the fact that chickens lay less — or not at all — as they get older. Without artificial light to give them a boost by creating the illusion of longer days, their bodies have been taking a predictable, and well-deserved, cold-weather break.

Lately, though, Liz and I have been wondering when “the girls” would get back to work. In 2015, the first egg of the year made its appearance on Feb. 20. Last year, it materialized on March 8. And this year?
 
Today was the big day.

The first sign came at dawn, when I released Snow, Nellie and Hope into the pen for breakfast. Snow and Hope continued to eat even after I finished cleaning the coop, but as soon as I scooped the last bit of poop, Nellie, a Rhode Island Red, sauntered back into the coop and plopped herself down in the hens’ favorite nest box, where they usually lay their eggs.

When I headed back to the coop at 8:30 to switch out their frozen water bowl with a fresh one, Nellie remained in the nest box. And that still was the case when Liz brought the hens a snack at 10:30, although Nellie quickly came out into the pen to get her share of mealworm.

We were starting to worry a bit by then, hoping that Nellie wasn't egg bound, which happens if a hen has a fully formed egg stuck inside. But when I carried out another bowl of water at 12:30, Nellie had vacated the premises, leaving behind a small but perfectly formed egg to kick off the 2017 season.

The outdoor thermometer read zero at noon and heavy winds made it feel much colder, but even though the weather outside was frightful, Nellie’s biological clock told her that her vacation had finally come to an end.

Nellie's first-of-the-year offering

Hen Chronicles: A work stoppage, then a return to normalcy

Maybe I should give up trying to understand chickens. You know, just go with the flow, as we used to say, and abandon any hope of comprehension.

Let’s start with our Plymouth Rock, Snow. We were under veterinarian’s orders a while back to reduce her exposure to sunlight for several days, to discourage her from laying eggs after she suffered what is commonly called a “blowout.” Properly known as a prolapsed oviduct, this occurs when part of the oviduct, the channel in a hen's body through which an egg passes en route to the exit, is partially “blown out” with an egg. That happened to Snow on May 17, and after the ejected tissue was pushed back in (yes, really), Snow had to recover in semi-dark isolation for a few days.

Snow was reunited with Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds, on May 21. But she did not resume laying. One day passed. Then two. Three. Then four. May 26th rolled around. Still no eggs.

Snow is old enough to retire, and we started to think she had entered "henopause." A full week after she rejoined the rest of the flock, she had yet to lay. May 29th came and went without an egg. May 30th too. To make matters worse, as Snow’s hiatus dragged on, Nellie and Hope slowed down. Then they stopped laying. Not for as long a period as Snow, but for several consecutive days.

Finally, on May 31st, when we expected Snow’s membership in the AARP (American Association of Retired Poultry) to officially kick in, she showed us that she hasn’t called it quits just yet.

Snow laid an egg.

On June 1, Liz gave the other hens a talking to about the importance of getting back to work. The day after that, Nellie and Hope were back in the game. On June 2, all three hens laid eggs, followed on June 3 by an egg from one of the Reds, and another the next day.

Hens can stop laying for all sorts of reasons, including anxiety and extreme weather. We’re not at all sure what happened in this case. Presumably, Snow’s recovery took quite some time. But why did Nellie and Hope join in? They had no injuries and showed no signs of being sick. Was it a sisterly show of solidarity? A work stoppage to protest unspecified grievances? Maybe they were egg-bound? Stressed out by the sound of a neighbor’s chainsaw when he cut down some trees near the coop? Adversely affected by a couple of unusually hot days?

Chickens do a lot of talking. I understand some of what they have to say ("where the hell is our snack?" and "the sky is falling") but they haven’t really explained their recent behavior. Perhaps the answer will turn up in their memoirs. The English translation, of course.

Hen Chronicles: Our rebellious hen does the right thing

Yesterday was the first of my twice-yearly cleanings of the coop (not to be confused with daily poop disposal). Among other things, this involves removing all of the old bedding and washing the coop floor with a vinegar-and-water solution.

As you might imagine, this takes a while, forcing our three hens to wait outside in the pen. The cleaning itself eats up about 30 minutes, followed by about 60 minutes of drying time before I can add fresh bedding and hold a grand reopening ceremony for “the girls.”

The only real problem with all this — aside from the fact that the hens don’t like change, even if it’s only temporary — is that Snow, Nellie and Hope lay their eggs in the coop, where the nest boxes are located. And there were no eggs to be found when I began my cleanup operation at 10:30 a.m., which meant the hens were off to a late start in that department.

Nellie and Hope each "donated" an egg on Friday, so they probably lacked any sense of urgency yesterday morning. But Snow had not done her bit since Thursday, so she was due to pay the piper, as it were. But the coop was now off-limits.

While I cleaned the coop, Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds, were alert but quiet outside. Not so Snow, a Plymouth Rock. She chattered throughout the exercise and reached FSV (Full Squawking Volume) as I began hauling my buckets, brushes and rags back to the garage.

But cry as she might, I couldn’t let Snow back into the coop because it was wet and bare. I went back to the house while it dried out, but Snow did not relent. When I peered out at one point to check on the hens, Snow was standing at the very top of the ramp, staring at the closed door in front of her and tossing her head from side to side, as if uttering some incantation that could be translated as “Open Sesame.”

Ninety minutes after the ordeal began, with the coop floor covered in fresh pine shavings, I finally opened the door at noon. Snow and Nellie raced into the coop side by side, followed by Hope. “The Reds,” as we call Nellie and Hope, wandered in and out of the coop over the next few minutes, but Snow parked herself in one of the nest boxes and didn’t budge.

When Liz brought the hens their mid-afternoon snack at 2:30, there was only one egg in the row of three nest boxes. It was Snow’s. (We know because her eggs are consistently larger than the others.) So despite her top-of-the-pecking-order status as a noisy, bossy, demanding hen, Snow had resisted the temptation to lay her egg in some dark or inaccessible spot while she was stuck outside. She did the right thing by waiting until she could get into a nest box. Like the good girl she is at heart.

Hen Chronicles: Coincidence, or a sign of gratitude?

Maybe our return had nothing to do with what happened Saturday, but I'd like to believe otherwise.

Liz and I were out of state for a good part of last week, and while we were away Liz's friend's son took care of our three hens. Snow, Nellie and Hope continued to lay during our absence, but they ate less than usual and they only produced one or two eggs per day.

On Saturday, with the two of us finally back on the scene, "the girls" laid three eggs.

The same thing might have happened, and under the same schedule, if our chicken sitter had remained on the job longer. But it's pleasant to contemplate the possibility that the hens were so glad to see a return to normalcy that they kicked things up a notch in the laying department, as their way of saying "welcome home."

Hen Chronicles: “Oh look! It's a brand-new nest box!”

You know how some people are so set in their ways that they refuse to make the smallest of changes in their routine, even if doing so would be to their advantage?

The same applies to some chickens. Three in particular.

As originally designed, our coop had one small nest box and a second one that was twice as long, and therefore twice as big, as the first one. Snow, Nellie and Hope all insisted on laying their eggs in the smaller of the two boxes, even when that forced two of them to share a spot that’s really only big enough for one full-grown hen.

Hoping to prevent these traffic jams, I installed a divider in the larger nest box last year, thereby creating two smaller boxes identical in size to the overused box. “The girls” now had three boxes from which to choose, each big enough to comfortably hold one hen. Three boxes, three hens, no more overcrowding.

That was the theory.

I made the alteration back in August. In the months that followed, the hens consistently ignored the newer boxes and continued to lay all of their eggs where they always have.

Until yesterday.

When Liz walked back to the house after giving the hens their mid-afternoon snack of yogurt, Cheerios and lettuce, she was carrying three fresh eggs. In an amazed tone of voice, she reported that she had found all three eggs in one of the never-used nest boxes.

Eight months. That’s how long it took the hens to try something new. And they still haven’t solved their space problem. Instead, all of them are now laying claim to a small bit of turf on the opposite side of the coop from the old nest box.

I don’t get it, but that’s often the case with chickens. Sometimes, it’s just best to leave them to their own devices. Most of the time, actually. Okay, all of the time.

Hen Chronicles: If it arrives a day early, is it an Easter egg?

Well, the big day doesn't roll around until tomorrow. Maybe one of our hens got fed up while anticipating all of the attention that self-promoting Easter Bunny will get tomorrow, so she decided to provide an early reminder that it's hens, not rabbits, who lay eggs . . . Easter and otherwise.

March 26, 2016, Augusta, Maine

Hen Chronicles: It's a good thing they aren't bookish

I'm pretty sure our three hens can’t read, which is just as well. I wouldn’t want them winging through my reference books, absorbing dangerous ideas about how chickens are supposed to behave.

More on that in a minute. First, some background.

Snow, our Plymouth Rock, is about five years old now, maybe older. She was a full-grown layer when we bought her from a couple in York County, Maine, back in April 2012. Although we didn’t ask about her age at that time, our best guess is that she was born in 2011, perhaps earlier.

Nellie and Hope, our Rhode Island Reds, hatched in January 2013, a few months before we bought them as pullets from a hatchery in the Midwest. (They arrived together, by mail!) So they are now more than three years old.

I mention this because all of the experts say hens lay fewer eggs as they get older. Yet our gals seem to be ignoring the rules.

“Most hens lay best during their first year, although a really good layer should do well for two years or even three,” Gail Damerow explains in her excellent book, The Chicken Encyclopedia. Owners should expect “a gradual reduction due to age.”

Robert and Hannah Litt write in A Chicken in Every Yard that the first two years are a hen’s peak laying years. “After that, production will taper off by about 20 percent a year, until by the sixth year . . . any eggs at all will be a bonus.”

Snow did stop laying during the winter months after her first two winters with us. And Nellie and Hope only laid during their first winter as adults, in 2013-14. Yet despite their age, none of them show any sign of slowing down the rest of the year.

Since “the girls” resumed laying in early March after a three-month break, for example, Snow has been turning out her unusually large eggs every other day. That’s the same rate at which she produced them last year. Nellie and Hope are on a similar schedule, although they sometimes do even better than Snow, by laying two days in a row.

Perhaps this will be Snow’s last high-volume year. Maybe Nellie and Hope will slow down a bit soon. If so, I’ll have no grounds to complain. Still, there’s no point in rushing the inevitable. That’s why I’m keeping literacy volunteers, and my reference library, away from the coop.

Hen Chronicles: Spring has sprung, at least for our flock!

Never mind the balmy weather and the warm breezes and the lack of snow and the muddy yards. The real proof that spring has sprung arrived yesterday.

One of our three hens laid an egg.

Technically, this first harbinger of the season occurred on Tuesday, March 8, when Snow, our Plymouth Rock, produced our first egg since the flock went on sabbatical at the end of November. Except that we never really saw Snow’s egg because it had no shell. (It happens!) The only proof of its existence was wet bedding in the nest box and a telltale yellow stain on Snow’s breast where the yolk somehow met its end.

But yesterday was different. The real deal. A perfectly formed brown egg which, judging by its size, was laid by either Nellie or Hope, our Rhode Island Reds. I found it in the nest box at 2 p.m., four hours after I spotted a seemingly preoccupied Nellie wandering in and out of the coop, as if on a mission that she wasn’t quite sure she had chosen to accept.

The first day of spring is still a week away, but members of the animal kingdom manage to track the change of seasons without having to consult a calendar.

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.

Hen Chronicles: To light or not to light, that is the question

Our three hens stopped laying weeks ago, as winter settled in and, day by day, their world grew ever darker. Yesterday, I finished off our dwindling stockpile of eggs when Liz stuffed three of them into a yummy but decidedly untidy egg-salad sandwich. 

"The girls" laid year-round when they were younger, albeit less frequently in the winter than during the summer, but now they've fallen into the not uncommon practice among hens of taking a winter break.

So it’s decision time. Shall we (a) break down and settle for store-bought eggs as winter drags on; or (b) simply give up on eggs until the days grow long enough to persuade Snow, Nellie and Hope to get back to work on their own initiative; or (c) trick the hens into laying sooner by lighting their coop for a few hours each day?

This is an open debate in our house. Liz thinks we should run an extension cord out to the yard and stick a bulb into the coop’s socket, on the assumption that chickens are in the business of laying eggs on a regular basis so there’s no harm in applying a little persuasion. I think we should let the hens live as their bodies dictate until there’s enough daylight for nature to take its course.

Maybe a compromise is in order, one that would give the hens a few more weeks of down time before we allow Central Maine Power to bring the illusion of spring to the coop and kick-start the laying process a bit ahead of schedule.

Time will tell.

Hen Chronicles: Definitive proof that winter is upon us

Winter has arrived. Not officially, of course, but the most telling sign of all leaves no doubt. I’m not talking about chilly temperatures, or biting winds, or even the white stuff. No, I measure the change of seasons by something far more important.

Our hens have stopped laying.

Snow and Hope called it quits weeks ago, as soon as they began to molt in response to the days growing shorter. Nellie, our third hen, kept working long after the other hens gave up, laying an egg every other day until Nov. 21. Then she, too, stopped. Days later, she began dropping feathers, to make way for new ones.

It's a double whammy, really. Less daylight, in and of itself, means fewer eggs, or none at all. And molting, which usually occurs at this time of year, has the same effect, as hens divert their protein stores from producing eggs to creating feathers.

When our hens were younger, they laid all winter long, although less frequently than during the warmer months. Last winter, though, “the girls” simply stopped laying until the end of February, when an occasional egg finally began to materialize in the nest box. The pace picked up as the days grew longer and warmer.

It’s a proven fact that lighting a coop to create the illusion of longer days will trick hens into laying during the winter months (after the molt), but that strikes me as cruel, or at least unfair. Snow, Nellie and Hope have earned some down time. They seem more relaxed now that they’re on vacation. The rising and setting of the sun, not electrified trickery, dictates their behavior.

The other day, I was talking to a woman who kept chickens for a while but has stopped doing so. Among other things, she expressed frustration that her hens had been “freeloading” during the winter. They had to be fed, watered and cared for, yet they were not producing eggs, which struck this woman as a bad bargain.

I don’t see it that way at all. Even while on sabbatical, our hens remain beautiful and entertaining and full of life. Isn’t that enough?

Hen Chronicles: To everything - turn, turn, turn

The off-season has arrived.

Shorter days mean fewer hours of daylight, and in our coop, which has no electric lights, that means a dramatic drop in egg production. Snow, Nellie and Hope laid a mere 20 eggs in October, compared to 45 in September, and that number is likely to fall even lower in the months ahead. If last winter is any indication, “the girls” may stop laying altogether for a spell.

I see this as part of the natural order of things, not as a problem requiring a solution. Lighting the coop to create the illusion of longer days is a proven way to keep hens laying. But our hens work hard during the spring and summer, so I figure they deserve a break during the cold-weather months, if they need one. That is, after all, how they are designed. Let them work — or not — according to the manufacturer’s specifications.

To deceive the hens with electrical chicanery reminds me of those TV spots from the 1970s in which Mother Nature, angry that she has been tricked into believing margarine is butter, unleashes thunder and lightning to accentuate her fearsome reprimand: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” (Never mind that Mother Nature was fooled. You get the idea.)

Anyway, even if I decided to light the coop, it wouldn’t do any good in the short term. Snow, our white Plymouth Rock, has been molting for about three weeks now, and continues to drop feathers every day as new ones grow in. Now Hope, one of our two Rhode Island Reds, has begun to molt as well. She’s smaller than she used to be, thanks to the temporary disappearance of her tail feathers. Every morning, the coop is littered with white and rust-colored feathers (in addition to the inevitable overnight deposits of you-know-what).

Feathers, like eggs, are largely comprised of protein and a hen only has enough of the stuff to tackle one task at a time. So a chicken that needs new feathers ASAP shifts gears, from crafting eggs to making a suit of clothes.

Shorter days and balding chickens. As the holidays draw ever closer, ’tis the season for many things. But homegrown eggs may not be among them.

Hen Chronicles: Why move when you love the old place?

Like many of us, chickens do not like change. Unlike many of us, they take their fondness for the status quo to extremes.

Our small coop always has had two nesting boxes, which Snow, Nellie and Hope were supposed to use to lay their eggs. In fact, all three hens always chose the same box, possibly because the unpopular box was twice as wide as the popular one, and therefore less private. Trouble is, all of the hens typically lay their eggs at roughly the same time, so traffic jams at the "in" box are common.

This has resulted in some comical situations over the years. It has not been unusual for one or two hens to stride back and forth in the coop, waiting impatiently for the occupant of the small nest box to vacate the premises. If one of the waiting hens was especially desperate, she might force her way into the occupied box. We then had two full-grown hens smooshed together in a box that’s barely big enough for one of them.

Early on Thursday morning, I decided to install a wooden divider in the center of the unused nest box. This instantly transformed the large box into two small ones. The coop now contained three nest boxes that were almost identical in size.

Problem solved? Not so fast. Predictably, this seemingly minor redesign created much consternation, at least initially.

As soon as I finished installing the divider, all three hens trooped into the coop from the pen, to investigate. They dutifully steered clear of the “new” nest boxes, while making their displeasure known by squawking, scratching the coop floor with great intensity, and pecking at the pine shavings that we use for bedding, even though the shavings aren’t really edible. This was especially humorous because the chickens wanted nothing to do with the wide box before I split it in two. So why did they care about it being altered?

The best answer I can come up with is this: because they're chickens.

The hens laid no eggs on Thursday, which is unusual but not unprecedented. Normally, we get anywhere from one to three eggs per day during the summer months. I toyed with the idea that Hope, Nellie and Snow were on strike, but of course hens don’t release or withhold eggs at will. So I looked around to see if “the girls” had laid their eggs elsewhere in protest, but found none.

Then Friday rolled around. Nellie, Hope and Snow each laid an egg. All three did so before noon. And all of them used the same old nest box, even though the other two are just as small, just as cozy, just as private and just as well padded with bedding.

Maybe, with time, the chickens will adapt to the fact that they now have more options. Or maybe they’ll sublet the other boxes to a couple of robins.

Hen Chronicles: Don't touch that egg! Please!

As soon as I opened the coop door at dawn this morning, I knew something was amiss.

I’ve probably mentioned before in this space that when I release “the girls” from their coop every morning, they make a mad dash down the ramp and into the pen, even smooshing themselves together as all three of them struggle to get through the narrow opening at the same time.

Today was different. When I opened the door, no one raced out. No one even moved. Instead, the right side of one of our Rhode Island Reds blocked the opening. The hen was upright, but she wasn’t moving, at least not from what I could see. The other two hens were not visible, and there was no telltale clucking from any of them, as there normally is first thing in the morning.

I quickly realized what was going on. The hens were silent and stationary because they had found something to eat in the coop. And the only thing they could have found to eat in the coop was a broken egg.

It’s been years since any of our hens deliberately broke a freshly laid egg to eat it, and quite a while since any of them laid a soft-shelled egg that broke on its own. This time around, the latter seemed to be the case. After I shooed the girls out into the pen so I could clean the coop, I saw that the egg shell, or what was left of it, was rubbery.

Chickens need calcium to form firm shells, and although they normally get enough of it from their feed, sometimes they develop a calcium deficiency. One solution is to give them crushed oyster shells, which they will eat as needed. Sure enough, as soon as I placed a small bowl of oyster shells in the coop this morning — something I had not done for quite some time — one of the Rhode Island Reds began pecking at it.

With any luck, that will solve the soft-shell problem. But now another problem looms. Saturday’s adventure probably reminded the girls that they love the taste of eggs, as all chickens do. So will they start breaking them deliberately, to get at the goodies within?

For the longest time, I kept two wooden eggs in the nest box, where the hens lay their eggs. The theory behind this is that if a hungry pen pecks a wooden egg, thinking it’s the real deal, the feel of beak hitting wood will be unpleasant enough to persuade her to leave all eggs — real or wooden — untouched in the future.

But my old wooden eggs disappeared from the coop years ago. The hens probably rolled them out into the pen and inadvertently buried them in the dirt while scratching for bugs. So I headed out to a craft store this morning and bought two new ones. Here’s hoping that dissuades Snow, Nellie and Hope from fixing their own breakfast tomorrow.