First Egg of 2005

Prize goes to — Hawklady!

I was sluggish getting out to the hens today, and just finished re-haying the laying nest boxes and feeding them.

This weekend I came down with a cold/virus, minor sore throat, allergy scratchylike really, on Friday, Saturday it was worse, but still not “cold like” but then woke up Sunday with it worse and a lightly congested chest. Monday was the day my voice started to get foggy sounding. This very day I was much worse and my voice is worse than hoarsy, it’s half-gone plus. At any rate, I’m dragging. Not totally bowled over, just blechy.

So I was late getting out there. Of course.

I put the grain (we now have Cert. Organic Soy-Free layer feed, it’s ground whole grain, not “crumbles” never “pelleted”. It’s nice stuff!) in the A-Frame, then went round the other side to check the “loft area” and low and behold there sat a nice blue/green egg. 🙂

Someone in there is still sleeping nights and messing it up. Most all the hay was kicked out as well. But the egg was there safe and sound.

So I re-hayed and of course Hawklady got up there and immediately kicked out a lot of the hay. I have to figure out a way to put an entrance hole to the loft, instead of having a 1-inch lip in the front only.

I re-hayed the Leghorn box too. They are in the SuperYard, so they have a bungee cord installed cardboard box, as I devised for that pen in 2004. No eggs from there yet, but they are sleeping on top of the box, poopy remains give them away! Also in the box, kicked out hay and poopy remains in there too.

I hope that they’ll begin laying and leave the hay there. They LOOK like they are getting redder. Their wattles are still the really red I’ve reported before, and their combs are just close, still not fully that red. Any day now?

I’ve considered that the other hens were getting close, and anticipating Hawklady to lay an egg, since I thought her tiny comb and wattles looked nicely red. Her signs like that are so hard to read though, since really they are so tiny, so very tiny. All the evidence is in though, with that nice blue/green egg today.

It had more blue in it as her eggs do when they don’t come out with a shiny coat on the outside. Most usually there is one, this day it’s the kind that is moreso dry or chalkier, rough in comparision to the smooth shiny coated exterior her eggs usually have. The brownlayers have coated eggs too, the white layers don’t. So it’s interesting to see the colored layer lay without the coating sometimes.

I don’t know what kind of shell true Araucana’s have, the birds that lay true blue eggs. So that’s just interesting, to see Hawklady’s egg more blue without the coating, with it it’s a lighter definite green.

So we’ll see what the next week brings, more green eggs every other day would be nice, and something brown and something white as well! We have a few more days of warmth expected, then colder weather coming in Friday night. I hope that won’t stop them from laying. I’ll be getting a metal panel over the one “window” on the lift-off-side side of the A-Frame. This will give them some more warmth in the case of chilly wind, and help warm if the sun hits that panel too.