Summer Egg Production

Or should I say Summer egg NON-production?  First of all, I cannot believe it's been almost two months since the last post.  I meant to get back within the week, but I guess life got in the way.

Egg production has been extremely spotty throughout the entire summer.  One day we'll get one egg, then it might go a few days before getting another.  Once in a great while we would have two eggs, but that has been rare.

Henrietta on left, Beulah on right

Now, we are quite certain that the hens have gone into molt.  First it was Beulah, then Henrietta started, but they weren't one right after the other, it was more like a matter of weeks passing before Henrietta really started.

  If anyone is curious how to tell if their chicken is molting, there are a few tell-tale signs.  First, you will see an excess of feathers on the ground and in the coop.  Then the chicken that is molting will start to look scraggly (the best way I can describe it).  I mean, after all if they are losing feathers they won't look all filled out.  It's been most notable on their necks.

Note the sparseness of feathers

 So, how do feathers come back in after they lose them?  It's pretty interesting really.  The quill part of the feather will grow first, then the feather continues to get longer, and the plumage starts to protrude out the end.

Quills forming on wing

Beulah has had a couple of episodes of being egg-bound for which we took prompt action.  If she absolutely cannot get the egg out on her own, then we will put her in a bath of warm water, massage the vent area with the warm water, and let her sit for awhile.  Eventually the egg will come out.  We also work to hydrate her, and replace electrolytes.  We've found the best product to use is SunRider's Fortune Delight.  It has other beneficial properties as well.  (It is an herbal drink for humans, but has all necessary electrolytes and other properties necessary for the hens as well.)  I have been giving them extra egg shells or oyster shells in their feed to try and keep them from getting egg-bound.  We haven't had an episode in several weeks now.

Quills forming on her back

Lately, though, they've been very happily clucking and scratching around the back yard.  So, they're in good health.  They love treats - anything from watermelon rinds to tomatoes, grapes, raspberries, and more.  One treat I discovered quite by accident today.  I was cleaning their coop out.  When I removed the nesting straw, I found there were several earwigs underneath.  They started dropping through the slot under the nesting box, and into the run.  Henrietta found them almost immediately and gobbled them up.

That reminds me of a funny thing that happened just a couple of days ago.  I had found a large spider (large for around here might be half an inch in body size.  This spider was sort of spotted.  I went into the house to get a jar to capture it.  Of course, anytime I'm working around the backyard the nosy hens are right there.  They might miss out on a tasty morsel otherwise.  Well, true to form the spider dropped to the ground while I was trying to capture it.  Before I could reach down to grab it, Henrietta gobbled it down.  I could only laugh.  I really wanted to photograph the spider and figure out what species it was.  I guess I'll have wait until next time.

Oh, and the hens also like LOVE slugs.  I feed them this treat whenever I find them on plant leaves and such.  I've noticed that they really love to hang around the raspberry bushes.

Next up will be a video of leaping chickens.  They love dried worms, and wait until you see what they will do to get them.

Egg Drops or The Soft Shell

Soft egg next to garden

Chicken keeping  -  So lately we've been running into an interesting situation with the egg production from our two hens.  We'll go for several days with an egg from each per day, then one day we'll just get one egg.  Later I would be walking around the yard, or the garden and find a soft egg deposited somewhere.

One day, several weeks ago, Sheri called me up and said Beulah was acting rather strange (I was not home at the time).  She said the hen was not making her normal clucking sounds, and was just sort of standing there.  Then she went into the run and just stood in front of the ladder not making any attempt to jump up and go into the coop.

I dug into it a little, and learned that a chicken can act like that if she is egg-bound.  So, I said to Sheri that she needs to take the hen into the house, and draw up a bath of warm water.  Then she needs to massage the vent area with the water to try and loosen up the egg.  Needless to say, Sheri was rather worried - especially since we lost Nellie back in November.  I'm now rather certain that it's because she, too, was egg-bound at the time, and died trying to get it out.  It's a sad feeling knowing that we could have done something had we known a bit more.

Next, I read that in a situation such as this the bird needs to get some electrolytes as soon as possible.  I could not think of anything we had around the house that had electrolytes, so I told her she had to go to the store and pick up some Pedialyte.  The store is just a few blocks away, and she hurried out to get some.  In the meantime she barricaded the bathroom (mostly so the cats wouldn't go in snooping around, and left Beulah in the warm tub.  When she returned she found egg parts in the tub.  The warm water apparently worked, and she passed the egg.

Soft shelled egg under
roosting bars (view from
above)

Sheri worked to get some of the Pedialyte down her beak, but it wasn't going well.  She said the hen started to sound her normal self, so the crisis was over.  Afterwards we found out that we actually DID have something we use every day that has electrolytes in it.  It's called Fortune Delight, a wonderful organic, herbal drink by Sunrider International.  We're Independent Business Owners (franchisees, if you will) of this company.

So, the issue with the soft eggs being dropped regularly around the yard is still plaguing us.  I decided to do some checking into the feed.  We've been feeding our chickens organic, non-soy layer mash from CFS Specialties, Inc.  Up until now it's been great.

Close up of a soft shelled egg

One of the things I discovered is that soft eggs sometimes come from the chicken experiencing sudden shock, but most of the time a cause cannot be found.  From Omlet's Wiki: "It is quite common for a hen to very occasionally lay a thin-shelled or soft-shelled egg. A few hens do this for a short while and a very few may do this for several weeks.

This is extremely unlikely to indicate a problem with a hen. The one-off dodgy egg is just a blip in the egg production system, possibly caused by a shock, but usually no cause can be found."


Another possible cause of the soft shell egg is not getting enough calcium in the hen's diet.  Now, the CFS Specialties layer mash is supposed to have all nutrients and food needs for a hen to be a good layer.  But, the feed is old, so I took some saved egg shells, pulverized them and added them to the feed.  It didn't seem to be making a lot of difference.


Then, through more investigation, I found out that the nutrients in the feed begin to break down after about three months.  Well, since we had purchased this fee back in July last year, this could be the biggest culprit.  It's nearly a year old!


I am picking up some fresh organic, non-soy layer mash from Nature's Grown Organics via JR's Farm and Garden of Crystal Falls, MI.  Hopefully we'll know within the next week if that changes things.  Keep your fingers crossed.

Chicken Antics

Here's a short video of Beulah waiting for Henrietta to finish up in the nesting box the other day.  Why they won't go in the nesting box at the same time, we're not sure.  There's plenty of room for two in there.  It could be a privacy issue.  Who knows?

This second video is of the two hens at sort of a CHICKEN STANDOFF.  See if you can guess who will move first.

Hand Feeding

Henrietta taking meal worms

Recently, Sheri called me all excited, because she had just gotten Henrietta to eat meal worms out of her hand.  None of the hens had ever done that before.  But, then again, we hadn't fed them meal worms before the weather started turning colder.  In an effort to help supplement their diet, since they can't scratch for bugs and such during the winter, we bought some dried meal worms.  We'll try other foods, such as table scraps as we have them, or cooked potatoes, or even hanging a cabbage for them to peck at, as we get time to do so.

Beulah

Beulah, on the other hand, would have no part of getting close enough for us to touch her.  She's always been much more stand-offish.  She'll come around when we're working in the garden, or in the back yard, but don't make a move towards touching her.  When we do catch her she clucks the entire time until we let her go again. She doesn't really seem to care much for meal worms, anyway.  They're really individual characters much like our cats.

Hens in run before being enclosed

I really suspect it's Henrietta that is laying the first egg each morning.  It just seems that Beulah goes into the nest box much later.  I don't know if that is part of the pecking order or not.  Of course, with only two hens there's not much of a pecking order.

Both hens seem to be quite content, though.  The temperatures are dipping into the single digits at night, but the enclosure seems to be doing a good job of keeping them protected from the weather.  The real test will come when the temps drop below zero for any length of time.