Finally, Let The Egg Laying Begin!

  My daughter and son-in-law are due to arrive today and our chickens are twenty and twenty one weeks old with no eggs yet.
  My thoughts were that hopefully they will start laying while they are here.
  Guess what? The first egg was found today! We are so proud...

   It is small, and we have no idea who did it, but we are proud.


   Update: The egglayer got seen. She is one of the Cherry Eggers. Hagitha to be exact. (Hagitha can be a real biddy to the other hens.) But we are still proud. Her first egg was on Sunday, and she didn't lay again until today, Wednesday.

   Update again: We have two egglayers now. The Golden Comets couldn't let the Cherry Eggers be our heroes so now one of them is laying, our smallest one, although her comb was a bit ahead of her sister's combs, and a bit more colorful too, Snowy. 

   The first egg was on the floor underneath the nesting boxes. But ever since then, all eggs have been laid in the nesting boxes. Good job, ladies!

   I could tell Hagitha was agitated about something that first morning. She was running up and down the pen's fence line and doing emphatic, desperate chicken screechy noises (The Cherry Eggers can sound very upset very easily. And Hagitha has always let me know when she is disturbed or miffed about something.)

  But I could see it in her eyes and as well as see it in her body language she wanted to go into the woods. Of course, I wasn't about to make her wish my command. I felt she was in a real panic though. I talked to her through the fencing, trying to calm her. (I didn't dare open the gate!)

   She would look at me and do her Hagitha verbalizations and run searchingly some more. Finally, I said, "If you have to go lay an egg, then get in the barn and do it!" I didn't yell, but I was a little exasperated at her antics, lol. I had pointed toward the barn while talking to her and she was watching me at the moment. She then ran up and down the fenceline once more sounding off and looking longingly at the woods behind the pen, and then she shot into the chicken house. She came back out and went back in. That time she was gone, and quiet for a few minutes. I waited out of curiosity.

   When she reappeared she was her regular self again and not anxious. So I walked away. My daughter had pulled up in the drive with my son-in-law. We chatted awhile and it was all forgotten until they wanted to see the chickens.

    We  did a thorough chicken nest check, nothing. And then I saw it when I bent down and looked underneath the boxes, in the far corner nearest the chicken's exit. It was so cute!

    I guess Hagitha's dramatics weren't for nothing that time! You could tell she wanted to get away from the crowd. But what a panic attack she had!

   Snowy was totally the opposite. She was seen practicing sitting in the nest boxes shortly before the real thing happened. It like she was trying or having some sort of nesting urge before the real thing happened.

  They have both been good egg layers with only an occasional day off, but where Snowy has been having all regular, small, normal brown eggs, Hagitha has had some irregularities. two or three eggs were larger than the pullet size and had double yolks. She has also laid a soft shell egg (one with no shell, but a balloon-like membrane to surround it). But the soft shell egg showed up the day after the hens got one wing (each) clipped. This was stressful to the hens. Not the fact they got a wing-clip as much as the fact we had to chase them, trap them, and handle them, lol. Wasn't that a noisy moment! So the day after we got the no-shell egg, an egg without a shell or a membrane dropped by another chicken on top of the nest boxes and already eaten (we found the wet spot and leftover whites that had soaked into the pine shavings, and yes we got rid of the affected litter and put fresh litter there). And by then we had one more egg layer. So there was one egg that was normal. Who knows which one did the normal egg, but because of the box it was found in, I suspect it was the newly laying cherry-egger. It tends to favor that box.

   And that's another thing, there seems to be box favoring. Hagitha a certain end, and Snowy favors the center boxes, while the other cherry egger (we know now it is Little Red).

  And then came the day that I saw it was actually Little Red that lays. I was doing a happy dance because everyone worried she was a small rooster. She showed us, didn't she? And we are glad since one hen already turned out to be our rooster. Who needs two? But she is a good little layer too.

  I have also caught Sassy laying, and Brownie. Both are golden comets. And I think I have seen Dora pacing in there thinking about it (golden comet again). I can't prove she lays, but one day recently we found seven eggs instead of four. Wow!

  So as you can see we are off to a great start now. And the eggs have moved up in size to medium in just a couple of weeks.

  These are some of our beginning eggs, the smallest ones are on bottom though I put a small one down front so you can see it. And some eggs look plain until you wash them, and you see their pretty speckles. So I cheated and washed them for the picture. As you can see they are still damp.
  
  Most people don't wash their until they are ready to use them, so they don't wash the 'bloom' off of the egg. The bloom is a slime coat that dries quickly. Some people feel that this coat keeps bacteria from entering the egg while it's sitting in the box, waiting to get used. Whichever way you feel, do wash the egg before you crack it or boil it.

  But when a speckled egg is gathered with the dried slime coat on it, you can't see the pretty speckles, they just look the color of dirt, until you wash them.... :)