Eggs (week ending 5/12): 41
Eggs (year to date): 439

Some highlights from the last week or so on the farm:

1) This morning I found a half-eaten chick in the nursery. Something burrowed in from the tack room and found a small place to get through, even though the chicken wire was both against the wall and on the floor. Then I realized that this left me with nine chicks - but I started with 12. I've been so busy lately that I didn't notice the disappearance of two others until the predator got sloppy. Chief suspects: a weasel, a rat, or maybe the other volunteer cat that I spared in last week's purge. Cleo the barn cat locked up, trap set, hole fixed.

2) I've got a couple of hens laying in a secret place in the hay again. I found two broken eggs in this little area today. Time for re-education. In other words, leave them locked up again.

3) I don't know if I mentioned it here, but I was really hoping for spring to get rolling because the chickens were going through 100 pounds of layer feed a month - and I've only got 17 of them. I wrote it off to winter, since they spent a lot of time in the coop instead of ranging. Then, tonight when I was working in the barn, I saw that one of the goats figured out how to stick its head under the goat gate (which they do frequently), and then get its tongue up into the feeder to lap out chicken feed. They also use the tongue technique to empty my wife's bird feeders when they're let out of the barnyard. So I moved the feeder out of goat neck and tongue range. I suppose that I won't really see a difference until next winter, since the temperature is picking up now.

4) I had a Silver Laced Wyandotte Hen starting to get broody last week - the same one that sat unsuccessfully last time. Three days of pulling it out of the nest box took care of the problem. But this made me wonder... the last time this bird got broody is when I was raising the Rosses in the fall. Now I'm raising Cornish Rocks and the bird gets broody again. Is it the season, or is this bird set off by the cheeping of peeps? I don't know.

5) I've decided that chicks are stealth growers. I didn't think the Cornish Rocks were growing very fast because of reasons already discussed. However, when I was in Tractor Supply today, I saw they had some straight run Barred Rocks. They also had some bigger chicks, a mix of straight run breeds that were maybe a week or ten days old, marked down to $.50 each. Some looked like they might grow up to be Buff Orpingtons, and I figured for $3 (minimum is six) I couldn't really go wrong. I ended up getting six of each. When I put then in the nursery, the larger Orpingtons-I-Hope were dwarfed by the size of the meat birds. So I guess everything is progressing as hoped.

6) I may have some Easter Eggers by Saturday.

Well, things do tend to happen all at once, don't they?