A Weekend of Madcap Whimsy

It's taken us (and by "us" I mean the Pirate) two weekends to finish the new nesting boxes, but finished they are.

As you might recall, we'd gone through a period of egg eating. It had gotten bad enough that we were losing two or three a day for a few days, until I realized that we had 6 nesting boxes and now 13 hens sharing them. They were feeling a bit...crowded.

The Pirate initially relieved the stress by opening up the lower area so that some of the girls could lay on the floor, but that's never the best solution. On the other hand, the egg eating ceased immediately. But our flock kept growing, and we needed more space.


So we've gone from nine nexting boxes to a luxurious 15, each one with some lovely Astroturf (mostly because what we've got now is straw that the dumb chickens just keep kicking right out of the boxes). What remains to be seen is whether the ladies actually use the things. The first day that the Pirate put the new building in, we found at least two eggs on the floor, so confused were the chickens. Then again, they're completely taken in every time Clark Kent takes off his glasses, too.

On Saturday, I was dispatched from the Co-Prosperity Sphere at an unseemly hour to fetch a hundred pounds of chicken feed and a carpet steamer. Well, somewhere between the feed store and the carpet steamer, I managed to learn about and subsequently acquire four more chickens.


I don't know the gender of these, but it's likely that at least two of the four are girls. They're about two weeks old, which means that we don't need to brood them and they can spend time outside. We've put them into Cargill's old quarters so that, for the duration of their chickhood, they have both their own house and their own yard. When first set loose, they massed together in a little huddle, keening if they lost sight of each other.


By today, they're doing much better, walking about on their own, scratching for bugs and otherwise having a lovely time.

What they needed now was a name. Our first group of hens was named "Lucy" and the second "Myra." We've decided that this one is called "Alice." Time will tell if there is an "Alex" in the bunch.

My Family and Other Animals

I have had trouble sleeping the past couple of nights. Thursday night, even though I had to get up an hour early to make it into Oakland for a 9 o'clock meeting, I didn't get to bed until 11:30 and I woke up promptly at one when the cat was doing some kind of nocturnal kitty version of Riverdance in my bedroom. No amount of "persuasion" (read: yelling and chasing out of the room with much invective) was working to keep the stupid cat out of my bedroom and quiet, and I ended up getting back from my daylong business meetings feeling like hell.

This morning, we had to be in Palo Alto at nine. Once again I went to bed long past midnight and once again, the cat decided to express herself via interpretive clog dancing in my bedroom in the wee small hours. This time I was better able to ignore it, but when I woke up, the Pirate was saying "Hey, come and see what I've found!" That's never a good sign.

"What I've found" turned out to be some kind of little rodent. Apparently, this little guy's been holing up in our bedroom, and our fearless huntress has been single-minded in her pursuit of the little beast.

But what is it?


I'm kinda stuck between a baby rat (it's head-to-body ratio is far too large for a grown rat, and it was only about 4 inches long in the body) or perhaps a weird feral gerbil. It was almost cute. Almost. Of course, my cat thought it was almost breakfast.

I'm surrounded by wildlife. It plagues me, mocks me and otherwise hangs out in my vicinity. Shortly after the pictures were taken, the Pirate took this little guy outside and threw him up on the hillside. On the one hand, he's gotten a reprieve from my cat. On the other hand, that hillside is chock-full of hawks, snakes and coyotes. Baby, it's a wild world.

It's a GIRL!

When we had the first group of chickens, we ended up not realizing that we had two roosters until it was sort of too late to make one into soup, so we ended up giving it away. It's tough - araucanas are built different from other chickens. They have rose combs that don't really start getting impressive until the rooster's 6-8 months old. Their saddle feathers (another reliable rooster difference) also take about that long to come in.

The current batch of four araucanas, the Myras, contained one whose gender was unclear. This particular group all have the classic araucana coloring (each feather has one color down the center and another color along the outside) and the normal raptor-like body, but the darkest of the bunch is a little bigger and more aggressive. Certainly not unheard-of in hens, but we had reason to suspect a Myron in the bunch.

Well, when I collected eggs on Wednesday, we got our answer: FIVE blue-green eggs. One for every araucana in our hen house, including our suspected Myron.


I put a piece of junk mail into the picture because in the past when I've taken pictures of just the eggs, people have said "They just look white." The fact of the matter is that they are demonstrably blue-green! Remember, our first araucana egg was Ralph Lauren's "creamy celery," and the rest are various colors along the "C34" spectrum in ACE Hardware colors. As you can see in the picture, they're NOT white. So, the good news is, they're all girls!

We're Egg Rich!

Okay, so it's not the amount of playtime. It's not feed or water or sexual activity.

At this point, I'm pretty sure that what it comes down to is weather. The productivity of our chickens seems to depend most on the temperature inside the henhouse. Too hot, and they don't want to be inside the stuffy coop while they lay. Too cold, and it's winter and they're not really laying anyway. Right now, it's juuuuuuuuuuuust right!

Yesterday, for the very first time, we got NINE - count 'em NINE - eggs! We are getting two different colors of green eggs, and now at least seven colors of brown eggs.


Honestly, I think it's a peaceful and beautiful sight. Contemplating the smooth, beautiful shells, the soft, warm colors...it's kind of easy to get all googy about them.

Now, if only the actual chickens weren't so goofy.

A Little Experiment

The long weekend has been rather quiet here. The Pirate's parents were here, but due to a family emergency, they ended up leaving rather quickly. The hens laid five eggs and we let them out for some play time. When we let them out, they run out and give themselves dust baths, and then they eat every green thing they can find.

Today, we got eight eggs. We let them out again for some play time and gave them the leftovers of some salad that wasn't going to get eaten, and some raisins. In addition to the salad and raisins, they did their level best to damage the weed population, and the bug population took a hit as well.

I'm betting right about now that tomorrow we get eight eggs - maybe nine. We've realized that the tiny brown pullet eggs we've been getting (we've gotten two so far) are from Little Black Lucy (who differs from Big Black Lucy in age by six months, and in the fact that she's not Cargill's favorite, and therefore doesn't constantly look as though she's been mugged).

We're looking now for some kind of correlation between the amount of play time they get outside their yard and how many eggs we get. We'll keep you posted.