Eggs (week ending 4/30): 37
Eggs (week ending 5/7): 31
Eggs (year to date) 772

Egg production continues to decline, but things should be getting better. I spent most of the day Saturday cleaning out the layer section of the coop (the nursery had already been recently cleaned). Yesterday I took the surviving six meat birds away to be processed.

I was also going to take a few culls out - I had three candidates in mind - but I changed my mind about one of them, and oddly enough, the other two that were going to be removed disappeared over the weekend. Now that's really odd. I am reminded of Chicken Run... part of me wants to think that they got word and escaped. The practical part of me says that I need to walk around the farm and see if I can find the remains of scattered piles of feathers.

On the other hand, production did pick up a little bit. On Saturday one of the Silkie/Cochin crosses laid its first egg - and as of yesterday I have three little banty eggs in the fridge along with the more traditional sizes. I also had some suspicions confirmed about one of the three S/C cross hens - it's a rooster. I was wondering about it because the comb on the top of the head, hidden in all those black feathers, seemed bigger than what was on the other two hens. On Saturday in the middle of pitchforking manure, I heard a crow that I thought was Handsome... but it turned out to be the black cross. In the days that followed, it has tried to jump some of the S/C hens, without much success. This one might be a cull, or it might get another home. We'll see.

There's also more good eating ahead. In a joke of genetics, of the three surviving Buff Orpington chicks, two are roosters, and of the four Barred Plymouth Rocks, three are roosters. I'm thinking about keeping a roo of each and culling (through adoption or other means) the Rhode Island Reds. Someone in the area is selling started pullets of both breeds, but I'm going to wait and see how this latest batch of chicks turns out.

The table is also where the roosters from the current batch of chicks will end up - but I think the odds are good that I might get some good layers out of the rest. I just hope that I have a good share of the White Leghorns that are actually female.

Meantime, I'll have to keep an eye on the hens. The surviving original Reds should be past the time for molting, but I have yet to see it happen. Maybe I missed it. By the end of summer the second wave of birds - the Red Sex Links, Silver Laced Wyandottes, etc. - should be getting ready to molt, too,. That might account for some of the production drop.

Of course, with two birds now gone walkabout, that would explain why production hasn't recovered yet. But with summer more or less here now, things should pick up. Hopefully.