Aren't we missing something?

Ah, yes, that's right. A shell.

I know its hard to see from the egg in the picture, but this egg doesn't have a shell. In fact the texture resembles something like a stress ball - though I didn't poke it too much as I didn't want to break it. This is the first egg we've had that's looked something like this.

The most confusing thing about this is that we had two in the same day. One egg from Pepper, one egg from Lemon and two shell-less eggs - one of which split the moment we tried to move it. The remaining shell-less egg was the same size as the eggs from the two larger hens - rather than being bantam sized. I'm not sure on the odds of getting our first two at once - but I'm guessing they would have been slim.

My hope is that at least one of these two was Fizzy's first egg as its not uncommon for a first egg to be shell-less. The other - who knows!

I have two theories. The first is that either Pepper or Lemon got rather confused and tried to lay two eggs in one day, and therefore didn't have time to put a shell on the second (the shell is the last part of the "egg making" process). The other theory is that when a bantam egg is not constrained by a shell it looks larger than it normally would, and that the second egg is therefore Frog's.

Of course, its quite possibly for both these theories to be true, and for Fizzy to still not have laid an egg. We'll have to watch and wait, and see what happens next.

A tale of two pests

Sorry for my absence last week: A relatively sunny bank holiday weekend seemed to take me away from my computer for the most part. A most pleasant experience. Did everyone else have a good long weekend?

I must admit though, I have a confession to make. Well, two confessions really. Deep breaths and here we go:

Confession number one
The first concerns last weeks worming. For a while now we've noticed that Fizzy has seemed a little under the weather. She seemed to be eating fine which is one thing to check, and she's never laid an egg which makes it hard to notice that she might have stopped laying, yet she stopped being her normal boisterous self. We'd assumed that this was because she'd slipped down a place or two in the pecking order. As each of the other hens has started to lay that seems to have given them a higher status, leaving poor Fizzy as a bit of an outsider.

However, a week after giving them wormer and she seems to have perked up again. She's still not really part of the group with the others but she's seeming a bit more full of life, and has started to tell us off again if we dare not give her a treat when we go out into the garden.

This is really good to see, but makes me feel bad that we hadn't spotted the problems earlier - and reminds me that at the end of the day we're still novices at this. We'll continue to keep an eye on her (and the others) to make sure that she doesn't pick them up again - and maybe she'll start laying soon if she's feeling better.

Confession number two
We were spending some time with them on Saturday and noticed that Pepper was looking a bit scragglier than normal. Digging around under her wings into the softer downier feathers I spotted a louse scurrying for cover. I only ever saw the one no matter how hard I looked, so we're hoping this isn't a bad infestation, but we gave all four hens a hefty dose of lice powder and disinfected the coop. Again, this is going to be one to keep an eye on and make sure that we've sorted now.

I'll tell you one thing though - I'm so glad that we've make a point of learning how to handle our hens, and getting them used to regular handling. They certainly don't come to us voluntarily, but the process of catching each hen and administering the lice powder was so much simpler than it would have been six months ago. The hens stayed fairly calm, and the whole fiasco was done in a matter of minutes. Phew!

p.s. Sorry for the lack of photos for this one, we acted first and thought about photos second!

Corn, glorious corn!

Photo courtesy of: yeagleya

I was spending some time with the hens last week, giving them a treat of some mixed corn. After a while, I decided that I should spend some time specifically with Pepper to continue training her to be handled. I caught her with relatively little fuss and was settling her onto my knee when I turned to look at the rest of the pen. I was shocked, though not really surprised, at what I saw.

Lemon and Fizzy both had their heads in the corn pot, eating as fast as they could. I'd not clipped the lid shut, and these mischievous hens are always ready to take advantage of such a situation!

They have recently become a lot more aware of the fact that corn doesn't just fall from the sky, but always comes from the same pot. Fizzy has taken to jumping up and pecking at the pot as I climb into their run - her way of saying "please, please, some of that please" (and yes, I do mean jumping). She will also now squawk at you until you give her the treat she can see - she really is becoming very demanding.

This also helped considerably when Lemon was wandering the garden recently. A quick rattle of the tin and she came running over to see what was on offer. Unfortunately Joe was attempting to photograph her escape at the time and ended up with some rather blurred chicken photos, oops!

In other news, after two weeks of limping, Pepper seems to be back to her old self again. The limp never slowed her down particularly, but it does seem to have gone away of its own accord *sighs with relief*.

A little bit of Pepper

Pepper has an issue. To be more specific: Pepper has a limp. We've checked her foot, and her leg. We've poked and prodded her to see when she reacts, and she doesn't. We've watched her behaviour and she seems to be herself; she's eating happily, squabbling with the others over any treats and running around like normal. Yet she is definitely reluctant to put weight on her right leg. We're leaving her for the time being to see if she can sort herself out, but it's worrying to see her hobbling so much.

One advantage of this is that we've been spending more time with her and she seems to be responding well to regular handling. I've said before that we'd had some problems as we've tried to tame our hens, but Pepper is now in no hurry to get away from us. She seems to be happy to spend time sitting on my knee once placed there, and I even persuaded her to voluntarily climb on to my leg the other day (with the help of a handful of corn of course). This makes me happy!

Theres one in every family

When I started this blog I promised you the ups and the downs of chicken keeping. So far the experience has been mainly a positive one, and if you'd like to maintain this illusion then you might want to skip this post!

As with all pets, hens sometimes need some T.L.C. To cut a long story short, Fizzy seems to have an issue with cleanliness around her bottom. This doesn't seem to be an uncommon problem and everyone has a different suggestion as to the cause. It could be a sign of illness (usually due to diarrhoea - not a problem here) or mites or lice (no signs that we can see). It could also be because the hen is sleeping on the floor rather than on a perch (if any of ours are guilty of this it would be Pepper), or just because they have lots of fluffy feathers. As Fizzy is an Orpington (a classically fluffy breed), we think that general fluff might be the problem. Fortunately Lemon (also a very fluffy hen) has avoided this so far - one bird at a time is quite enough!

The first time this happened we kept an eye on her for a while to see if it would improve, but made a final decision that we would need to step in one sunny Saturday while the girls were all free ranging in the garden. Twenty minutes of chaos later we had four very flustered hens and one very unhappy Fizzy! Having caught her, we covered her with a towel to keep her calm, and carefully cleaned everything with a bowl of warm water and a lot of patience. Fizzy was well rewarded with grapes and everything went back to normal.

Six weeks later and we're back where we started - but a little wiser this time. We plucked Fizzy from the coop with a lot less fuss and took her inside as the weather is now much colder. Having cleaned everything again we also trimmed the feathers in that region. We checked for any signs as to why this is happening, but can't see anything, so we have to assume that it might just be a perpetual problem.

I have heard rumour that this sort of thing can improve as they get older, and that other chickens in the flock will help with grooming hard to reach areas. Until such time though I think we'll have to try to maintain a preventative approach and keep things well-trimmed. This certainly wasn't something I bargained on when getting chickens!

An egg, an egg, my kingdom for an egg!

I'm sure you are all wondering why I have yet to mention eggs on this blog. A little unusual for a blog about keeping chickens I'll grant you. The girls are now 24 weeks old. They could have started laying at anything from 20 weeks old. Could.

This means that for the last month we have been watching and waiting for our first egg. Every sign of unusual behaviour has had us hoping. There was the night when Pepper decided that instead of going to bed she was going to walk round in circles clucking. Surely that is a sign of a hen about to lay her first egg? Apparently not. All our waiting and hoping has been in vain, and to date we have had no eggs. You heard me; no eggs.

Instead they have decided to moult. This in itself is confusing. An adult bird will moult fully once a year during the autumn - but not in its first year, so ours shouldn't be doing that this time. The other option is that this is the last of the partial moults they are supposed to do before they reach adulthood. They should be too old for this but it seems to be more likely than the first option as none of them have lost large quantities of feathers on this pass.

Whatever the reason for the moult, no hen will lay while she is trying to regrow feathers so it seems we'll have to wait a little longer. We have one more problem though; most hens will reduce laying a lot over the winter months with some stopping all together. Our hopes for eggs before spring are therefore seeming more and more far-fetched.

Pepper seems to have finished moulting for now, having regrown all of her beautiful tail feathers so maybe she will soon grace us with an egg or two. Or maybe she'll decide that the weather has been too miserable and she can't be bothered... we'll have to wait and see!

To the chicken keepers among you... has anyone else had a spring chicken not lay before its first winter?