what kind of chickens?

[rainbowgardener]

Today we had our first day of getting six eggs in one day from our six hens!! We have sold 2.5 dozen eggs this week and still had enough for ourselves. This experiment is going well. We were total newbies when we started.

[rainbowgardener]

While the chickens were free ranging our backyard, I noticed two of them throwing something around. I went to look and they had a garden toad cornered and were pecking at it and managing to pick it up and drop it on its back, repeatedly. I shooed them away and went back to look. The toad wasn't there any more so apparently it had enough life left to hop off somewhere.

I know they are carnivores as far as eating grubs, worms, insects, but that was not something I expected! Hope the toad is OK.

They are a little bit of a mixed blessing in the backyard eco-system. They eat the japanese beetle and other grubs and pest insects, but also earthworms and other detritovores out of the compost piles. And they are agents of entropy! Anything I have piled, like leaf pile, mulch pile, brush pile, they immediately have to un-pile. That is mostly funny, but I do spend a lot more time raking my piles back together. If I decide I don't want to, then I will have to fence off the piles to exclude them, but so far I'm okay with it, rather than having lots more fences (I already have all my garden beds fenced.)

[rainbowgardener]

So here with the days getting very short, our chickens have cut their laying in half. They were laying one egg a day a piece, almost every day, like about 6 a week per hen. Now we are down to about three per week per hen.

I had heard that if you give them supplemental light in their coop in the winter, they keep laying better, so we had been thinking about doing that. But as I looked in to it more, it seems that it is kind of stressful on the hens to keep them laying with no break. AND (like human females) the hens are born with all the ova already inside them that they will ever have. So if you keep them laying year round, it just means they will have fewer years of laying as they use up the supply faster.

So we decided to keep our hens natural. Natural is how I do plants, so it makes sense to manage our hens the same way. They still seem very happy and healthy. They apparently "like" us, at least they follow us around the yard a lot, come to check on what we are doing, and come when they are called (as a flock, they do not respond to or recognize their individual names at all; chickens may not have as strong a sense of individuality as people and dogs do, since they are such flock animals). They are very well-behaved, come when we want them to go back in their coop, lay all their eggs in the nest boxes and no where else, and almost never poop in the nest box.

At one point we went away and left the chickens free ranging in the back yard for a couple hours. When we came back, our next door neighbor told us he had a chicken in his back yard. He was making elaborate plans for how to get it back in our yard, but as soon as it saw us, it immediately flew back over the fence and came to us!

We love our little pet hens!!

[applestar]

I love your updates. It sounds like the chickens were your best gardening addition this year (as well as your labor of love building the raised beds, of course)

[digitS']

... So if you keep them laying year round, it just means they will have fewer years of laying as they use up the supply faster. ... as soon as it saw us, it immediately flew back over the fence and came to us!

We love our little pet hens!!

Hey! It's good that you are enjoying them, RG.

The depletion of the ova has been a subject of study by a WSU researcher. She used Coturnix quail in her study but they aren't very distant as a relative. What was interesting to me is that there is a multitude of ova! Before they are "lost," the bird ages beyond its reproductive life. However, keep in mind that 300 eggs a year was beyond comprehension for people keeping laying hens a couple hundred years ago.

Okay, the wild chicken lives in much lower latitudes than the US. If you lived near the Arctic Circle, you would never think of NOT providing supplemental lighting in your heated coop during the winter months.

See, there are a couple sides to this supplemental lighting issue.

Steve

[rainbowgardener]

Thanks for the info! What I have read says that those of us not at all close to the Arctic circle should NOT heat the coops.

These hens went through some freezing weather when we first got them in march, when they were a month old. They seemed just fine. Just huddled themselves up in a big feather pile to share warmth. I think chickens are pretty cold hardy. Our average low temperature is 30 degrees all through Jan. and 30-36 through Feb. We average nine nights a year when the temps get down to 20 degrees and 30 nights a year when it gets to 32. But even in the coldest part of the winter, the daytime temps are always above freezing, Jan average high temp 48-50. And all that is historic (pre- global warming) averages. My two winters here, we haven't seen anything like 30 nights in a year when it got down to freezing.

In these temps, I think it is better just to let the chickens adapt to ambient.

[digitS']

They will adjust and especially those of your breed choices. They aren't scrawny lightweights. You may not even notice much of an increase in the calories the hens will be eating.

I never really had the lightweights, either.

It probably wasn't a very good idea but I once allowed the chickens to make their own choices of where they wanted to be during the coldest weeks of a cold winter. This was on a farm and they promptly abandoned their small coop and moved to the more open barn.

I noticed that on days when the temperatures did not warm above zero Fahrenheit, they wouldn't leave the floor and would stay in the loose hay. On those days, they seemed especially lethargic. That was probably coming too close to their survival limits.

Steve

[rainbowgardener]

New question:

Since the days got short, our hens are laying about half as many eggs. I understand this is to be expected.

But recently one of our hens (we don't know which) has gone back to laying eggs that are very small and very pointed. We were told that eggs like this are normal when they first start laying. In fact each of them did lay one or two small pointy eggs when they were starting to lay, in early summer. Since then, we haven't seen any more like that until now.

What do you think, friends? Is this normal or a sign of some problem?

[digitS']

You will need someone with more knowledge and experience with laying hens than I have, RainbowGardener. Although I had backyard flocks for a good number of years, they never amounted to very many hens at a time and I never had a single class in animal husbandry in school.

What I did research and learn as a gardener with chickens mostly had to do with their diet. Eggs are primarily protein and fat and water and the minerals in the shells. It takes a good deal of all four to allow a hen to produce an egg each day.

Fresh water and something like crushed oyster shell should be there as a constant and a free choice. The calories in their food can be converted to fat.

Proteins are a little tricky if garden produce is a very large source of the hen's diet. Most vegetables may be good sources of calories and other nutrients but they are often low in protein. What protein is there isn't a complete animal protein, like the hen is producing in that egg. So, a balance of proteins has to be in her diet to sustain egg production.

The production of eggs can be turned off by factors like environmental and biological change and dietary deficiencies. However, the hen has these genetic imperatives, pushing those eggs along. It's a reason that highly productive breeds cannot switch to a brooding cycle to hatch their own eggs, completing a reproductive cycle that egg laying is all about. They are compelled to produce not just 10 or 12 eggs to fill a nest but many, many more than that!

My guess is that the hen laying substandard eggs is just winding down from a more productive period. Attention to her complete nutrition requirements may be needed but, then again, it always should be a very important concern.

Steve

[rainbowgardener]

They are not fed mainly off garden produce. They have good quality commercial chicken food for laying hens and oyster shell and grit available on demand all the time. They never see the bottom of their feeder. Lately we have been supplementing with high protein chicken "snacks" with sunflower seed and a lot of other stuff in it and with meal worms, for extra protein. The garden produce or kitchen scraps when they get them is just a little extra treat, that makes more diversity in their diet.

[Allyn]

I wouldn't worry about the pointy eggs as long as the shell is smooth, it isn't thin and the yoke and whites look normal. I have one that gives me very pointy eggs and one that gives me very torpedo-shaped eggs. Out of 30 laying hens, I don't know which ones they are, but they're fairly consistent. If one or more of your girls are being troopers pushing out an egg with so little daylight hours, we can't fault her for the shape. At least you're still getting some eggs. Wait 'til next year when they face reduced daylight hours *and* they're molting.

I keep telling her she'll be gorgeous in a couple of months.

[rainbowgardener]

Yes, these eggs seem perfectly normal-- the yolk is even full sized, it just seems like it has less white. But it wasn't consistent in the sense that we got eggs like that at the very beginning when they first started laying, then we hadn't seen one for months. Now that the days are short and production is going down, they appeared again. It seems to be just one chicken, because there is only one of the pointed ones a day and not every day. So far the ladies seem to be doing pretty well. We are still getting between two and four eggs a day from our six hens (down from four to six a day previously).

They do seem to be dropping more feathers, we are seeing a lot more feathers around, mostly the downy ones, but a few bigger ones also. But not enough that any of ours are looking patchy like that.

[Allyn]

I feel confident in saying that the pointy eggs are fine. In a commercial poultry farm where you have tens of thousands of anonymous laying hens and the eggs travel on giant conveyors to be sorted by size and packed into cartons, it's easy to come away with the idea that eggs are always the same shape. When you have a handful of hens and you enjoy a daily relationship with each of them, it is more apparent that eggs are a natural product in which size, shape, and color can and does change from time to time. If the hen is healthy and the only thing out of the ordinary is the shape of the egg, I think you're fine.

On an aside note, they don't usually molt (or at least very heavily) the first year and they lay pretty well through their first fall/winter. You'll notice a difference next year when production drops quite a bit more and the coop looks like teenage girls are having a pillow fight in there every night.

[productivegardener]

No heat in the coop...period. Chickens need a dry, draft-free, well-ventilated coop. A fully-feathered chicken can handle sub-freezing temperatures as long as the coop is dry, has no drafts and is well ventilated. People think it needs heat because they've had or they've heard stories of chickens getting frostbite on their combs. The problem isn't temperature; the problem is moisture.

Agreed. I live in western Pennsylvania and only heat my chickens' water to keep it from freezing. The coop is totally sealed from wind and weather so the cold is not a problem.

[rainbowgardener]

So our chickens kept producing some eggs, but fewer and fewer right up to about Christmas. Then we had about three weeks with zero eggs. And this is with no supplemental light or heat. When it was so cold, we were closing the door to the box where they sleep/ roost/ nest (most of the time we left it open, so they could go in and out as they pleased), to cut down drafts. This worked pretty well. I could tell by sticking my hand in, that the inside of the box, with six hens generating body heat, was significantly warmer than ambient. We also stood bedding bales up in front of a lot of the screened areas and put tarp over the unroofed areas. With all that, they seemed to be fine when the temps went down in the teens. We were bringing their water in at night and taking it back out after it warmed up enough so the water wouldn't just freeze too quickly.

A bit more than a week ago, we started getting a few eggs again! But from six hens we have been getting one egg every other day. Don't know for sure which hen(s) are laying them, but we know it is one of the golden girls. None of the Ameraucanas have started laying yet.

So now that we have passed imbolc and are half way between winter solstice and spring equinox, is there anything we can do to encourage them to resume egg laying? Those of you who have chickens are yours laying yet?