The Mystery of the Missing Eggs

Today's Find!

When you hear the words "free-range chickens" what comes to mind?  A feathered creature roaming free eating ticks and bugs to her heart's content?  Yes! 

...But you probably don't think of what that means for the egg collector.  Yes; it's a perpetual Easter Egg Hunt around here.  Free ranging means...eggs could be ANYWHERE.  We only have around a couple dozen hens, and some of them are definitely past their prime egg-laying years, so whenever the egg production drops it's always a bit of a mystery.   ...Are the hens just too old?  The fact that they free range means we're never really sure which ones are laying and which aren't.  No one wants to be the one to cull the chicken that lays the golden eggs (although ours are brown)!  ...Is it the approach of winter?  Shorter hours of sunlight result in many of our hens ceasing to produce eggs.  So we attach a timer to the lamp in their coop.  How long will it take before the timed light results in eggs again?  (Insert twiddling fingers here.)  ...Are they moulting?  When the temperatures drop, the hens get their "winter feathers," and (you guessed it) stop making eggs.  Are they done moulting yet?  (More twiddling fingers.)  ...Or it could be all of the above!  Or...maybe they have just chosen a new spot to hide their eggs!

So here is where I found today's clutch of eight eggs: inside the barn, on top of our leaf pile, behind a wall of hay.  The hens had scooped a little bowl-shaped hole out of the leaves so that the eggs were hard to see if you just glance at the leaf pile.  But since none of our hens are broody, the eggs did not have a chance to develop.  A hen has to sit on the eggs for a number of days before they can grow and hatch into chicks.  (Since broodiness has been bred out of a lot of chickens, this is not very common.)  Since we moved here, we have only had one naturally hatched chick, which we named Little Shadow.

When we first moved to the farm, we had couple of "old birds" who used to like to sit on eggs.  We had read that we should discourage such "nonsense" as they couldn't possibly sit long enough for the eggs to properly develop, and that would waste good eggs.  As good novice farmers, we would pull them from their sitting and toss them outside.

Little Shadow under her mother's wing. Flair, a rare Chantecler hen, hatched Little Shadow all on her own, concealing herself behind the compost pile.

Then one day in the spring of 2013, one of our five rare Chantecler hens, Flair, disappeared.  Was she eaten by a predator?  Struck by a car?  Nope...after 21 days she reappeared, with her one chick in tow.  Little Shadow doesn't look much like her mother (in fact she takes after her dad, our Cuckoo Maran rooster), but that didn't interfere with the bond between Flair and Little Shadow.  Even when she was really too big to fit, Little Shadow still liked to sleep under her mother's wing.  And her mother seemed to like this closeness as well.  Little Shadow was the first animal "born" (well, hatched) at Claret Farm, so she'll always be special to us.  ...There were other eggs in her clutch that didn't hatch.  But Little Shadow has produced far more eggs than the ones we didn't get a chance to eat.

Will there ever be another hatchling?  We certainly hope so!  In the meantime, we will continue on with our Easter egg hunts.  But if we find a hen sitting on a clutch of eggs...well, we'll let her sit there as long as she wants.