On Nick's birthday his feathered girls gifted him with our first egg. We were unsure which chicken was laying but we had some suspicions. Throughout the last week our white leghorn began laying beautiful white eggs alongside the other anonymous egg layer. We were so excited to see all our care and hard work begin to pay out.
Today Teilee was peeking into the neighbors backyard hoping to spy a playmate to speak with and discovered, to her horror, our white leghorn in her final resting place. She screamed, cried, and was destroyed to see her precious Brachiasaurus laying dead in the grass, feathers strewn about the yard. A couple of the chickens were let out of the coop this morning and unfortunately we did not think much of it. The biggest danger of leaving them in the backyard was the damage they might inflict on my garden. Brachiasaurs, our fastest, noisest chicken, decided to teach us a lesson and flew over the fence into the neighbors yard. One of the dogs in the yard was probably overjoyed at the presence of this super fun new live toy. She was not mauled horribly or eaten so we were able to recover the 'body' where we plucked a few feathers for Teilee to remember her chicken by. Once Teilee was able to quit crying she decided she really wanted to leave the chicken somewhere that a fox could eat it. Despite loving that idea, for simplicty sake, I convinced her to bury the chicken in the greenbelt where a fox could dig her up but she would not attract unesecary human attention. Landis was so curious and kept asking if he could step on the dead chicken or poke her with a stick. He thought if he poked her hard enough he could wake her up.
RIP Brachiasaurus.
We are recovering from losing our Brachiasaurs and have now decided to take a few more chickens in before winter. Hopefully this week we will be able to rig up our coop to have room and provide some seperation from the other girls. Then we will be ready to go chicken shopping again. We had lost one other chicken previously due to it deciding to stetch its vocal chords and become a rooster. Now we are down to six chickens. Unfortunately the chicken we lost today was already an egg layer. However we are sure that the rest will begin laying soon.
We did learn who was laying the other eggs.
After all the excitment of the morning Teilee brought our small banam, T-rex, to the front door. Teilee bent down, still holding the chicken, and an egg droped onto the sidewalk. Yup, the chicken layed an egg while Teilee was holding it. What was great was that Teilee, our neighbors two daughters, and our neighbor Chris were all witnesses to the event. Crazy!! We pulled out the camera and recreated the scene for posterity. Most chickens begin laying pullet eggs, which are small early versions of the bounty to follow. The light brown eggs we were finding have always been small. I believed it to be normal that pullet eggs just stay small for a while. Now I know that they are small because they are from our small Banam. T-rex will always be our smallest chicken and will always lay small eggs. They are what Landis would call 'cute' eggs (anything small these days is 'cute'). 'Cute' eggs from a 'cute' chicken.
