anyone with chickens have any idea how this striated egg from one of The Girls came to be? try as i might, i have a hard time imaging a creation story. the striations are perfect lines where there is less of the unusual whitish coating.
bonus points awarded for explanations that account for the coating and the perfect lines.
one of The Girls, wandering out and about in search of greener pastures, encounters the remains of The Last Snowman and gives him a long look, perhaps wondering if he’s going to put up a fight for his discarded carrot nose.
i don’t think he has any fight left in him.
the warmest day of spring yet with the temperature reaching just shy of 80°F create the perfect conditions in our still flowerless flower beds for a dust bath and the The Girls need no one to tell them to settle in for a Lazy Sunday of Lounging in the dirt to help control mites.
we kept a large bin of ash for them to take baths over the winter but they never seemed very interested in it. i guess maybe it just didn’t compare to a rolling around in real dirt.
chickens can sometimes have a reputation for not being particularly nice to each other but The Girls really get along quite well and it’s amusing to watch them laying all over each other enjoying the day in the dirt.
about six weeks ago we discovered something had gotten up in our roof and i wondered about how you remove a critter from an inaccessible section of a roof? i tried plugging the hole with vinegar soaked socks ( didn’t work ). and steel wool pads ( nope ).
i even stapled a long length of window screen around the hole with a metal bar attached thinking if i made it tougher for the critter to get in and out it it would just leave. it just chewed through the screen.
finally, i decided to try the most suggested suggestion given by folks who had said they tried everything else. a “live trap”. i guess i would have tried a live trap to start out, but i couldn’t figure out how to easily rig it to the side of the house given where the hole was in the soffit and fascia and how the trap door mechanism opened and closed.
so, i temporarily turned in my handyman card and had a local fit-it guy come over and put it all together.
and in very short order, we trapped One Very Suprised and Angry Squirrel!
of course, The Girls were Mighty Interested in just what on earth was causing all the racket in the cage. they quickly gathered around clucking loudly, “SOMETHING’S DIFFERENT! SOMETHING’S DIFFERENT!”
i contemplated various ways of disposing of or relocating the squirrel, but in the end i just decided to let him go in our yard. we have hordes of squirrels living in the three 120 foot spruce trees in our backyard.
i mean, he’d probably be grateful and never return to the roof again? right?
while free ranging around the yard one of The Girls discovered how to get into our fenced-in blueberry patch which features 4 inch deep pine needle mulch.
apparently this is the equivalent of Heaven on Earth and all the other Girls soon saw her followed her lead after seeing her ecstatic scratching around the mulch.
it was all good until they realized they couldn’t remember how they got in.
i can read their collective little chicken minds.
“dude, get that thing out of my face and let me out of here.”
i checked for eggs for the last time late this afternoon and found one egg which appears to have been pecked by one of The Girls! it doesn’t seem like she pecked all the way through the tough membrane, so it’s possible she didn’t get A Taste of The Good Stuff inside which we’ve heard can be Very Bad. once they get a taste of an egg they quickly learn that it’s much yummier than their regular food and will quickly eat all the profits, so to speak.
but why now? i don’t think we have any of the typical causes of egg eating – weak eggshells, improperly built nesting boxes, overcrowding, too much light in the nexting boses, insufficient nest litter etc. kris fessed up and said that a few weeks ago she inadvertantly dropped an egg and didn’t realize it until she saw some of The Girls Pecking away at it. perhaps that’s the cause? though it rather strange that it took them a few weeks to get around to investigating whether the eggs in the nesting box are as good as the one they found on the ground.
any eggperienced folks have suggestions for how to prevent further egg eating? everything i’ve read indicates that it’d difficult to break the habit and it’s best to cull the offenders sooner rather than later. thoughts?
after a few weeks of enduring sub-zero temps The Girls definitely enjoyed getting out of the The Coop today with mid-day temps reaching 55°F! of course, they’ve had the opportunity to stroll around in winter when weather permits but the spring in their step made in quite obvious that they really, really, really are looking forward to warm weather and greener pastures.
OHMYGAWD! EXPOSED GRASS TO SCRATCH AND PECK!