Disappearing Egg Trick

Thanks to good advice from Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, we have been keeping scrupulous chicken records - number of eggs per day, when we've bought feed and other sundries, etc.

In the past week, egg production has dropped by more than half. We've gone from 7-8 eggs per day to 3-4. The Pirate and I went outside and scoured their yard for hidden caches of eggs that might be either hatching or ripening into stinkbombs, but there's nothing. We checked inside the coop, including stripping it to the bare boards yesterday while it was being mucked out.

We thought it might be because the freakishly huge Cornish crosses were using the lowest nesting boxes as napping boxes, but we boarded them up to force the girls into the upper nesting boxes and it's still no good. We went so far as to pick each of the laying hens up and inspecting their vents (the hole the egg comes out) and palpating their abdomens. It was no fun for either us or the chickens, and they all looked normal, if peeved.

I don't know if it's the crowded condition of the coop (eased somewhat by the elimination of the first six of the Cornish crosses), some sickness shared by 4 of the 8 hens, or something else entirely.

I have one more theory. The Pirate showed me an egg he'd cracked yesterday with a blood spot on the yolk, indicating that it was fertile. Now, if you check down an entry or two, you'll see that Cargill has been shut up on his own for nearly a month, but according to the Mississippi State University Extension Service, hens can continue to produce fertile eggs for up to four weeks after the removal of a rooster. But our hens didn't start laying until they became sexually active. Each hen started laying shortly after Cargill started showering her with "affection." I'm wondering if the lack of attention is somehow affecting egg production.

My plan is this: I'm going to keep an eye on the situation until the 18th, when we plan to butcher the last of the Cornish crosses. If egg production hasn't returned to normal after that, I'll re-introduce Cargill to the population. I don't want to do it before then, because he was mounting the Cornish crosses who were unable to fight him off and ended up sustaining some injuries.

We'll see how things go...