| Our hens are not confined at this point, although in a month or so they'll be moving to a large flight cage to settle before being turned out into the padock and pasture out behind the crop area, in what I loosely term my 'arena'. But for now, the girls and their consorts have free run of the whole farm. Oh, they have their barn, and the kennel flock has a large covered kennel that they roost in, and then some roost in the trees, but I digress. At any rate, this is great for the chickens, not so easy for the egg collector. Right now there are around 10 nest sites I have to check every day, and when the day's total comes up short I know we have a new nest, or someone's setting....
Today I have a conundrum. I've used all but one of the bales of hay I had stored in the loafing shed of the barn, and I need to start using the hay on the back side of the barn. I use just better than 1 - 50 lb. bale of grass hay per day to feed the horses, goats and Niki the llama. I sure don't want to have to get hay when I have 100 bales on the backside of the barn. Unfortunately, the hens have decided they have a need for them too. I have one hen who'd decided that the top of the stack would be the ideal spot to set a clutch of eggs. She was already part way through incubation when we noticed her up there, so I didn't want to disturb her, she is after all, expanding the flock for me. I'm setting about 40 more eggs in the incubator as our hens' eggs are popular enough the we can justify adding to the flock, but, hey, if a hen want's to help out, who am I to say no?
Ordinarily this wouldn't be a problem, I'd just take hay from the other end of the stack. Unfortunately, I saw 4 hens coming out of that end this morning, and sure enough, a new nest. Considering that most of the other nests were short of eggs, and this one had enough fresh, clean eggs to make up the difference in what I was short, it looks like half the flock is laying in this one nest.
This picture shows the hay that I'll be starting to use tomorrow. The pic was taken a couple of months ago when we had the big snow in the Portland, Oregon metro area. #1 is the location of the hen in the pic at the start of the article. #2 is where the market eggs are being layed. Looks like I'll be prying hay from the middle of the stack, which will be interesting as I have the hay stacked absolutely as high as it'll go in the shed and some of the top bales are kind of wedged in between the rafters. There's another layer on top of the layer that you can see under the eves.
I can't really afford to disturb the nest of sale eggs, we already have more orders that we have eggs, hence the reason for incubating more eggs, and the extra roosters will come in handy to either sell or butcher our selves. Truth to tell, as much as I like chicken, if I can sell the roosters I'll do that and eat beans.... The setting hen is almost through with incubation, and I hate to disturb her until the eggs hatch. She's pretty broody, and I'm afraid she'll try to set again if I take the eggs away from her at this point. I had a silky hen that went really broody on me once. She'd set, and I'd take the eggs from her, then she'd find another nest to set. She just wouldn't quit - silky chickens can get like that. I finally had to take some day old chicks out of the brooder and put them with her. That brought her right out of it. So I want this girl to go ahead and hatch the eggs.
Plus, she's one fierce hen. I put my hand up there the other day, just to see how many eggs she had under her. I know what to expect when I do that. Liked to punched a hole in me.... |
