A Poultry Tale

It has been awhile since I've given you any news about "The Girls". And yes they are all girls...in fact Josephina, who I was worried might be a Joseph, has turned out to be one of our most prolific layers. I do believe she was one of the first to start laying and she has carried right on with nary a stop since she began.

Nelly too, once the most henpecked of the bunch, and still the bottom of the chicken totem pole, has turned into a prolific layer. We can usually count on these two to give us an egg a day.

But things have been getting cooler here with temperatures dipping down into the low 30's at night. So when we started seeing fewer eggs, even though we were disappointed, we weren't all that surprised. One day we didn't get any. The next day we got three. We just figured that that's how it goes with laying in the colder months.

Oh contrare mes amis.

On Sunday, our dear sweet thief puppy greeted Husband with an egg in her mouth. How...did she get an egg!?!?!? we wanted to know. Husband made a beeline for the chicken coop and found everything secure except for an outside corner of the coop where our little thief puppy had been digging. This seemed to be the only logical place she could have gotten it from, although we were somewhat mystified as to how an egg got on the ground when there are four perfectly good nesting boxes in the coop.

Then this morning my dear little daughter, who loves the chickens more than any of the rest of us, went down to check for eggs and came back with a very dirty one in her hand telling me she had gotten from the ground outside the coop on the same corner that Puppy had been digging. AND one of the chickens was down inside of that corner of the coop under our makeshift floor. The floor is just two pallets stacked on top of one another with a piece of plywood on top.

Well, I decided, I've got to get to the bottom of this. So I pulled out the plywood. There in the corner was Josephina happily sitting on six eggs. We shoo-ed her away and I pulled out the pallets. As I was pulling out the pallets I ran over a seventh egg. Now with those seven, plus the egg puppy found and the egg Daughter found there were nine eggs. They had all been layed by either Josephina or Nelly.

Our two best layers have gone broody on us.

I'm not sure yet what we will do about this. I feel kind of bad for them...wanting chicks and all. For now the flooring is out of the coop, but we will have to put something back in by the end of the day. I'm thinking that we ought to skip the pallets and maybe just lay a few bricks down and put the plywood on top of that. We'll see what husband says when he gets home.

So there you have it...just another pawltry...I mean poultry episode in "As The Chicken Turns".