What better way to spend an evening at the advanced fire academy, than to update my journal. Totally random stuff regarding my first year of chicken-keeping:
- Chickens get lonely if they are by themselves... but they will quickly learn to consider you and your dogs to be their family, and follow you everywhere.
- They will eat almost anything. They especially love berries and pomegranates. Ours even eat leftover pork. Because they are like dinosaurs - little velociraptors!
- Marsala, the Rhode Island Red, may have started laying at 5 months of age. We aren't certain, because by the time Tim realized she was laying eggs, there were already 16 eggs inside her nest box. I still don't know how he didn't notice all those freaking eggs, poor Momma hen!!
- They say that in the winter, egg production drops off. Well Marsala must not have gotten that memo. She started laying in October and laid an egg almost every single day ALL WINTER. She averages 6 out of 7 days or so. It's amazing.
- We have 3 nest boxes in the coop; Marsala will lay eggs randomly in either end nest box, but will not lay in the middle one for some silly reason.
- She does not lay an egg at the same time every day. Sometimes its like 9-10 am; other times it is in the afternoon.
- A freshly laid egg looks wet, but it dries magically within seconds.
- Marsala laid a completely shell-less egg! Apparently it just happens every once in a while. It had nothing to do with nutrition (she gets oyster shells for calcium, a good layer feed, etc) and she laid normal eggs before and after the freaky squishy egg. It was pretty weird looking, held together with that thin flexible membrane... I had to poke at it, because it was neat.
- The two younger chickens are finally "friends" with Marsala, and they all hang out together...but make no mistake, Marsala is still the Big Momma and nobody messes with her.
- The younger girls might start laying in the next couple weeks... wonder what color eggs our Easter Egger will lay! Could be green, or pinkish, or blue!
- I'm a big fan of chickens.
- I still think they are like little dinosaurs.
