After a long summer of idleness, in which our 16 hens busied themselves growing their capes of thick, shiny feathers and sorting out which among them is queenliest of all, they have finally, and after much anticipation, started laying eggs. One of my son’s friends discovered the first clutch last week, tucked gently in the pine shavings in one of the nest boxes. “Hey, eggs!” he exclaimed, grinning as he palmed his prize to show his friends. Soon a herd of children was rushing into the living room, crowing the news loudly. From their pride and excitement, you would have thought they had laid the eggs themselves.
We are now collecting three brown eggs a day. Like most first eggs, these are small, but they will get progressively larger as the hens’ bodies get used to the business of egg laying. Remembering all 8 pounds and 10 ounces of my first baby, I support this mercifully incremental strategy, and will be able to wait patiently for full-size eggs. I am sure that eventually we will be up to our ears in eggs, collecting more than a dozen a day. But for now, production is slow, and every time I carry a handful of wee brown eggs back to the house, I can’t help but do some quick math. Two pounds of feed a week times 16 chickens for the last six months, plus pine shavings and daily labor, means we have paid well over $600 for our first dozen eggs.
We haven’t yet surprised any chickens while laying, so we are not sure which are our producers and which are still freeloading. The books tell us that some chickens will sing an “egg song” before or after they lay an egg, but we haven’t encountered that behavior yet either. I wonder what an egg song might sound like and imagine the tone to sound somewhere between bewildered and braggy. The hens have many new vocalizations these days, and nearly all have to do with food. The New Hampshire Reds, confident and inquisitive, cluck loudly to announce the morning arrival of the human food dispenser, while the Wyandottes, bossy and anxious, constantly monitor who eats what, always alert for injustice. When one chicken snags a treat from another, they scold and nag, making suspicious, scolding groans in the back of their throats. The Reds don’t seem to care, but I am prone to guilt. The ’dottes have me well trained, always willing to scatter a few more handfuls around.
I suspect the Reds are our layers. They seem like the most effortlessly chickeny birds of the bunch. They were the first to take dust baths, rolling blissfully in the dirt while the other breeds watched suspiciously, not quite sure whether or not they were being pranked. The Reds have also been the first to learn to dig for bugs and worms when we let them range freely around the yard, while the Cochins look on, mystified. The Cochins, fussy and gentle, seem like the most limited birds in our flock. They’re always the last to show up when something interesting is going on, rushing over with their bulky, wide-hipped stride as if they just realized they’re late for a meeting. Some of them still take multiple tries to remember how to get out of the pen. We call these birds, affectionately, the Turkeys. It is not a compliment.
Slow and easy to catch, the Cochins, predictably, are my daughter’s favorites. She often lugs one around the yard under her arm, singing and talking quietly to it while the bird hangs tolerantly in her grip. The kids spend time with the chickens every day, still enthralled with their backyard flock long after I thought they would have lost interest. Now that they’re starting to lay, my son has big plans for all our eggs. “I’m going to learn to scramble,” he announced one morning. “And Mom, you are finally going to learn to flip them as good as Dad does when he makes our eggs over easy on toast.” I truly hope I’m up for the challenge.
