I found a very small egg in the coop. It only weighed 22g.
Sometimes when this happens there is no yolk, but I poked holes in both ends and blew out the contents, and there was a yolk and a white, just in smaller amounts.
I suspect it was just a reproductive track hiccup, most likely from Wing Ding the hen, since she is my only active layer, and it doesn’t have the translucent white deposit that makes Faverolle eggs look pink.
Last year I had a reader reach out with a conundrum: she had three nest boxes with a golf ball each, and somehow the hens moved all three balls into one nest box. I suggested that they nudged or rolled them and to look for a ledge.
Fast forward to this week, and I found my two golf balls in my two nest boxes both in the same box.
There is no rolling or nudging possible between my nest metal boxes.
So I did a little more digging with the search phrase “can chickens move eggs”. We are not the only people to experience this phenomenon, but it is not common. One person even captured a picture of a hen carrying two eggs! The hen tucked the eggs between her legs and body and stabilized them with her wings. That particular internet chicken forged while carrying eggs, so moving eggs from one nest box to another is certainly possible. Or golf balls.
Of course these two nest boxes are not viewable with my web cam, so I don’t have photographic evidence of my hen moving her treasures.
When we added two chickens to the flock and had them separated, I put a hanging feeder in with them. When I integrated the flock I kept the hanging feeder full because I wasn’t sure the new hens would be able to use the Grandpa’s Feeder my original flock used. Turns out that all the hens preferred the hanging feeder. The advantage of the “Grandpa’s Feeder” is the wild birds and rats aren’t heavy enough to activate the lever and open the food bin. The disadvantage is that bugs can still get in. When checking feed I discovered that the entire bin was full of food riddled with holes.
One of the other advertised advantages of the Grandpa’s Feeder is that the metal grid and high sides keep the chickens from wasting food because they can’t fling it out of the container. A hanging feeder has this same advantage, so I emptied out the Grandpa’s feeder and decommissioned it, since I was only feeding bugs.
Another advantage of the hanging feeder is that I can see the food level from a distance. A disadvantage is that it is open on the top and if we get a heavy rain storm I loose a batch of feed to the wet. I’ve moved the feeder farther inside the porch area of the coop to see if that fixed the weather problem. Overall, the hens prefer the hanging feeder, and the hanging feeder is a fraction of the cost of a Grandpa’s Feeder.
In the light of day I went out to repair the rips in the hardware cloth in the chicken runs so no more skunks could slips through. I took scraps of half inch hardware cloth and wired it to the damaged quarter inch hardware cloth.
I found that with two layers of hardware cloth, making a spiral of aluminum wire made it easier to lace the wire through the cloth, since I didn’t have anyone on the other side to feed the wire back to me.
After threading the spring through the layers several times, I would tighten the loops and twist in the ends. Using this method and using smaller wire “ties”, I reinforced the rips, and secured the solid mesh over the weakened areas.
I also put a layer of 2×4 no climb welded wire on the outside as protection from weed whackers. As a precaution, I have been making sure the coop is secure at night, rather than relying on run security. I do have an automatic chicken door, but I check each night that it is working, and verify it opened in the morning.
I think it was Jade that was taken down by the skunk, but it could have been Schmoo. I won’t be able to tell for sure until next molting season, since Jade has (had?) a very distinct feather loss pattern.
I lost my first chicken to predation this week. When I checked on the four remaining hens, one of the Faverolles was unmoving and had clearly been snacked on. Reviewing the camera footage showed a young skunk galavanting all over the inside of the coop. The chicken it killed was feeling poorly, she had been sleeping on the floor for a couple days rather than on the roost. I didn’t think anything of it because I’d never had a predator invade, I just built her up a throne of pine shavings in the corner so she could be close to her sisters.
I found where the skunk got in, the 1/4” hardware cloth on the meadow side of the runs is torn. I leave the coop door open all night during the summer to keep the temperatures down. For the last six years the runs have been secure enough to do so. Repairing the unauthorized entry will be in a future post.
Critters and Craft 