Back to 3 eggs a day!

Evangeline has started laying!

size difference!

Her eggs are tiny compared to Deirdre's. Mabel has also started laying again after her egg strike through the winter. Her eggs are quite a weird shape at the moment, but hopefully they should go back to normal soon.

We've also fully integrated the girls now. There is still quite a bit of pecking going on and poor Evangeline does get bullied by the other two, but a few squirts of the water pistol puts an end to any squabbling!

Our weird and wonderful variety of eggs.

Eggs-traordinary!

Found a two-tone egg in the nesting box this morning!



Friends at last?

I think we may have turned a corner in trying to integrate the girls. Look what I spotted!
Deirdre and Evangeline looked deep in conversation and Mabel wanted to get in on the action as well.

The girls having a friendly chat

conversation over!

Mabel chasing Evangeline away from her favourite  flower bed

So a couple of days ago we let the girls all free-range together. Evangeline loved being out in the sunshine and started digging around for some nice, tasty insects to eat. Deirdre and Mabel did chase her around for a while and would give her a bit of a peck when she got to close to any food they were eating. But eventually things settled down.

Dustbath

We've let them all out together a couple of times. Poor Evangeline does still get chased a little and is definitely at the bottom of the pecking order, but so far, so good.

Maybe next week I'll be brave enough to take the bamboo cane divide out of their run and integrate them fully (Gulp!)

Ain't nobody here but us chickens

Deirdre and Mabel having a dustbath.

 We've kept chickens since June 2009, when Thomas was about 8 months old. I'd always wanted chickens. In my head I have this romanticised image of having a small-holding with chickens, ducks and goats. Living in a semi-detached house in Southampton hasn't really lived up to my dream and I thought keeping chickens wasn't going to be possible. That was until I saw the Omlet people at the BBC Gardener's world show in June 2009. The Eglu is designed to fit into a small garden allowing people who live in cities to keep "urban" chickens. That was it! I couldn't wait to tell Paul, who was somewhat less enthusiastic about the idea, having just reduced the number of pets down to 4. (we used to have 16 guinea pigs). Anyway, I persuaded him and on July 15th 2009 our Eglu arrived with our three chickens; Maggie and Mabel (Gingernut Rangers) and Deirdre (a Miss Pepperpot).

Hermione and Evangeline

About 3 weeks after the girls arrived, we started getting our first eggs. Each chicken lays one egg every 23-30 hours (approx) so we were getting 3 eggs a day.

Sadly we lost Maggie over the winter (2010). We're not sure what happened, although we suspect she may have been egg bound. Also over the winter the other two girls stopped laying, so we made the decision to buy two more chickens, Hermione (Bluebelle) and Evangeline (Amber link).

Close up of Hermione - RIP

We knew that introducing new chickens could be traumatic as they need to establish their pecking order and work out who will be the boss lady. There are two schools of thought. The first is to chuck all the chooks together and let them sort themselves out, and the second is to keep them separate and gradually introduce them in stages.

We only have one Eglu and one run, so we went for option 1. It started out ok, with just a few squabbles and after the first day the girls seemed to be settling in quite well.


However, on the morning of day three, I noticed that Hermione and Evangeline hadn't come out of the Eglu, even though we'd opened it up at 6.30 am. When I looked in I noticed that Hermione was bleeding. Hens are magnetised to blood and will keep pecking at an injured chicken if it is bleeding, which is what I think happened to poor Hermione.  Paul took her straight to the vets to get her checked out. When he returned half an hour later empty handed I knew that Hermione wasn't coming back home.

Separating the Eglu run 

We had a decision to make about Evangeline.  Not wanting a repeat performance we had to try to come up with a way of keeping the girls separated while still allowing them to see each other. Paul constructed a grid of bamboo canes, threaded through the bars of the run to create two separate runs. We then found an old guinea pig run with a covered house area that we put into Evangeline's half so that she would have somewhere to roost at night.

Mabel and Deirdre are not impressed!

At the moment the girls are still separated. We let Mabel and Deirdre out to free range during the day, but poor Evangeline is still kept in the run. I think we will let her out next weekend, but I want to make sure that one of us is in the garden, ready to break up any unruly bullying from the old girls.

Hopefully, they will all be best of friends by the summer and we'll be back to getting our three eggs a day.

Our first egg August 2009