Second Childhood

It's been a while since we visited the chickens. They're still down in the henhouse, clucking and cooing and turning into the sort of ladies who sleep until noon, gorge themselves and gossip incessantly. Everyone knows a few like that, don't they?

In the last two weeks, we've started getting pullet eggs. Pullet eggs, for the uninitiated, are much smaller than regular eggs and often have no yolks. The first pullet eggs from each of our girls *did* have a yolk, but the yolks were usually the size of a bean. The Baby Goddess loved them, as they were just the right size for her. Not that she eats eggs, but still.

But wait, you say. Your hens are no longer pullets, exactly. Aha! I see you are on the verge of spotting the reason for our consternation. You can see that the pullet egg is about a third the size of a regular egg (for puposes of comparison, I've put a penny next to them - our eggs are normally what the supermarket would consider "large").

Here's what we suspect: one of our araucanas was grievously injured by a dog in February. She lost a great deal of skin and feathers from her back and neck, but has survived and seemed fairly recovered, although egg production has never been what it was before the dog attacks. But in the past few weeks, we've been noticing that she's been getting the beginnings of feathers on the bare patch on her back that we'd thought incapable of feathers. It's heartening, because it means that she continues to recuperate, albeit slowly. If it's her that's just started laying again, that's great news - it means that her recovery is internal as well.

We've yet to rid our roost of rats, but give it time. We're...um....lulling the rats into a sense of false security.

That's our story and we're sticking to it.