Forty-nine eggs were laid this week... well, 50 counting the one my daughter found in the barnyard that had no shell at all... but only 40 eggs were taken in for consumption.

Friday afternoon, one of the Silver Laced Wyandottes moved into one of the nest boxes with the intent of hatching out the five eggs that were in there at the time. I pulled her out and collected the eggs, not wanting her to go broody on me. When I took her out of the next, she stayed down in the straw, all flat and spread out like she was still trying to hatch the eggs.

I told my wife about this and we thought it might be interesting to let her hatch some eggs out, although I was planning to wait until spring to do that (one reason I got the Cochin/Silkie crosses last week). I decided not to worry about it because the last time a Wyandotte went broody, she broke the first day after I took her off the nest and confiscated the eggs.

Saturday I went in to collect eggs and... there she was again, this time in the box next door. I decided to let her sit. I wasn't sure how many eggs she was sitting on, so I took the three I collected from other boxes and slipped them under her.

Yesterday she was still sitting faithfully, and I took her out of the nest long enough to count how many eggs were in the clutch. One under each wing and seven in the nest. Nine. It must have been a busy day in the henhouse, considering six eggs were laid in the same box.

This morning she peeked her head out when I let the other chickens out and called them to feed. I went into the tack room to get a handful of scratch for her - I didn't know if she'd gotten the chance to eat yet since she started this little enterprise - and found she was off the nest, eating with the others. I checked just before I left for work and she was still off and had disappeared - probably looking for some dust for a dust batch (good luck this time of year in Ohio). Hopefully she's back on the nest at this writing.

I expect she'll be back on the nest by the time I get home. If not, well, it was an interesting experiment while it lasted - making it a good thing that I got the aforementioned chicks so I could have some broody mommas in the flock.

If the Wyandotte continues to sit, I'm going to subdivide the nursery and move the entire next box with her sitting into the new section to give her a little space to finish the hatch and raise the chicks (the box stands free on the floor and I have another next box I can put in its place while it is "gone"). But this all depends on whether or not the Wyandotte mother has lost interest in the next or not. We'll see.

A lot done over the last week. Collected 50 eggs, finished the famous goat gate (just need a little hardware now to work on another door), and I added five newcomers to the flock.

I found out that another member of the Backyard Chickens Board had some Cochin/Silkie cross chicks he wanted to get rid of. I knew Silkies made good broodies and mothers (people use them to hatch and raise other eggs, including other species of bird), and I found out that Cochins were the same way, only bigger. So my wife and I took a short drive up to Akron and ended up with the entire stock of regular sized hatchlings, five in all. Two are yellow with chipmunk-type stripes down their backs (checking Feathersite, these will probably be partridge colored) one is yellow with a gold-brown tint; another yellow with a greenish tint (these two are likely buff - maybe one is a roo); the fifth is black (could be a blue or a bearded black - we'll see).

This meant having to clean out the nursery section of the coop, reinstalling the fence to separate it, and adding a new feature - a draft shield that I made out of scrap lumber that can be removed (along with the fence) when it's time to integrate the flock.

And speaking of integrating, I'll be experimenting more with that on Wednesday, when a few more chickens arrive. I'm getting a couple of started Easter Egger pullets from another BYC member, and as a bonus of sorts, there's a bantam birchen cochin rooster making the trip up. After seeing the heavy breeds and banties getting along in Akron, I'm sure he'll fit in, but I'm concerned that he'll fly over the fencing into the nursery and cause problems for the chicks. So that's another creative solution I need to come up with.

More on how I solve that potential problem - and how I integrate the new arrivals - when it happens.

Once I get the tweaks to the other doors around the gate, I'll take some pictures and post them here. I'm sure someone could have done better, with a superior design, but I'm pretty proud of the way the gate turned out. I've never thought of myself as mechanically adept, but it was a challenge to come up with something that would serve double duty by locking up one set of goats or another, while letting the other roam free. I'm pretty pleased with the solution. Whether it actually keeps stubborn goats in their place remains to be seen.

Roast chicken for dinner last night. It was good.

The nine Rosses came back as 47 pounds of whole chicken; my wife stood on the bathroom scales, holding bags of chicken to get the count. I kept rough track of the food it took to raise them - about $50 worth (would have been cheaper without the delay caused by the lack of electricity in the barn), plus $16.50 to have them all processed. I didn't count electricity. I also didn't count my labor, because it's a joy for me to keep chickens and with the related health benefits (exercise and the lowering of my stress levels when I'm in the barnyard), I should be paying more to keep them.

Anyway, crunching the numbers, it worked out to $7.50 per bird. My wife said this was a little more expensive than whole chicken at the supermarket, but on the other hand, we know what went into these chickens.

But I broke it out another way and figured we paid a total of $1.50 per pound of bone-in chicken. My wife: "Well, it's higher than buying wings and drumsticks, and a lot lower than buying breasts."

Overall: Worth it? Yes.

Lessons Learned: I'm going to do meat birds differently next time. I plan to buy straight runs of dual purpose chooks this spring and cull the roos when they get to be of eating age, along with retiring some of the older members of the laying flock. These will all be active ranging chickens, so not much will change there.

But if I go with a straight meat bird, whether through purchase from a hatchery, or winning chicks from the local poultry processor at the fair, things will be different. With their tendency to eat a ton and befoul the coop, I have decided to raise meat birds in a chicken tractor - a wonderful invention that lets them get grass under their toes and bugs to eat, but also lets you move them around frequently. Benefits to chickens - fresh air, sunshine, varied diet, more hygienic conditions. Benefit to yard - ground scratched up, bugs and weeds eaten, fertilizer left behind.

So this spring I plan to raid my father-in-law's supply of scrap lumber to build one. An 8' x 4' tractor would support ten chickens with three square feet per bird (plus a small nest box area for them to get out of the sun). After walling off the new goat stall and building a gate, I should be ready for it.

The girls are happily producing. Ten hens, and I'm getting seven to eight eggs a day, 49 this last week. What's odd is this happening in our cooling weather - temps were down the last few days, with frost finally appearing. Maybe it's the residuals of the lovely Indian Summer we've had. There was that time in October when they slowed down to five eggs a day or so, but production has been up since then.

It could also be that they're back on layer feed, although since I let them free range, they're rather easy on the feed. Since Labor Day there was starter/grower in the feeder since the meat birds don't range, just hang around the coop and eat and defecate. I made the switch back last week since I knew the meat birds were going away to be converted.

Or, it could even be the four Silver Laced Wyandottes proving their pluck as cold weather layers - even though the real cold weather has yet to set in.

Anyway, whatever the case for the production, I'm not going to argue with the results.

This weekend I spent Saturday putting the finishing touches on the stall for my daughter's goat. I got a short wall put up to limit the space we'd need to clean up, and mounted boards around the fencing that was already in place to hopefully keep the new kids from exploring in forbidden areas of the old barn. I also got the lumber cut for what will be the two-way gate. I've designed it so that when the doe is out ranging in the barnyard, the two wethers are locked up, and when the doe is locked up, the wethers can be outside ranging. Hopefully I won't botch the construction job, and it'll actually work.

We'll see what happens.

Closed the week out with 47 eggs and the White Rock saving herself from being culled next Monday (D-Day for the meat birds).

A couple of weeks ago, I reported (I think) finding a cache of four eggs in the tack room. While doing some work Saturday, I happened upon the White Rock, once again trying to hide herself in that same location. When she moved to get out of my way, she was sitting on four eggs.

This was odd since I'd been collecting near-normal numbers of eggs from inside the coop all week long. So I watched the White Rock, and she hunkered back down on the eggs. When she got up again I collected them, and later that day my daughter reported seeing an egg in the same location.

So contrary to my belief, the White Rock has been laying eggs - just not always in the coop. So no trip to the butcher for her.

Also on Saturday, while in the house, my wife heard great consternation among the chickens, who were outside near the porch. I went out to investigate and saw two roosters wandering off and reported that they had apparently gotten into a dust-up of some kind. Then my daughter heard and odd sound on the west side of our house. I thought it was the cuckoo clock, but when I peered straight down out one of the windows, I saw a gray bird right at the edge of the house, looking back up at me. We called my wife over, and she confirmed that it was a hawk. I started to run out to see if it was injured when my wife called out "It's got one of the chickens!"

So I backpedaled on the porch to grab a broom to chase it off with and started to run around to the east side of the house. As I did, one of the Rhodie hens came running full tilt back toward the coop. Rounding the corner, I saw the hawk sitting on a post near the house. It saw me coming and took flight, veering over the barn as it left.

Apparently the hawk took after the chickens, who scattered, and the Rhodie ran to the side of the house and hunkered down for protection. The hawk got hold of it, but for whatever reason couldn't take off or go in for the kill. All the stomping and shouting from inside the house apparently encouraged it to give up. And the roos managed to miss out on the whole chance to be a hero, probably because the hen wasn't squawking (or maybe they were upset because they heard the squawks but couldn't find the damsel in distress).

Well, the flock is none the worse for wear. But as my daughter put it, "If Jean-Bob had been around, none of this would have happened."

Indeed.

As I mentioned, Saturday my daughter and I worked on getting one of the stalls ready for a soon-to-be-pregnant doe. We took Clover to get bred with an Alpine buck named Elmo, and we want a separate place when she gets back so the wethers don't give her too hard a time while she's pregnant.

The meeting with Elmo was kind of funny. He knew there was a doe coming right away, and stuck his head out of the fence to greet her. When we got her inside the pen, he spent ten minutes chasing her around, not subtle at all about his intentions, poking his head at her with his tongue stuck out.

Hopefully Clover will wait a week or two before going into heat, giving us time to finish work on the stall and dual-purpose gate I have in mind (to keep her in while the wethers are out and vice-versa). It's going to be busy on the farm until all of that gets done.

Make that 183 eggs for the month and 7 eggs for Sunday. While chasing down the White Rock in the tack room this evening, I found a cache of four eggs that some misguided hens apparently left there yesterday. Goofy things.

For the last full week the egg count was back up to 48. Sunday, the last day of the month, and not counted in any week because it is off by itself on the calendar, netted only three eggs, less than half of last week's daily average. The total for the month of November: 179.

I'm making a phone call tonight or tomorrow to take the Rosses in this weekend to be processed. As I mentioned earlier, the White Rock will be making the trip with them.

Then the winter will be quiet - at least until the end of February or so, when I go into Tractor Supply and find that it is once again Chick Days, and see about stocking a new generation.

Actually, though, I'm thinking of ordering through McMurray Hatchery this time out. The plan would be to order straight runs of some breeds I'd like to try out and cull all but one or two of the roos I get, depending on how many hens I'll end up with. By the time they're laying, the last of my original Reds should be finishing up their molting process and heading into their last cycle of laying, which means they could be culled with the fresh meat newcomers.

I should also comment here on a remark my daughter made. She noticed that the coop seemed smellier since getting the meat birds. I'd noticed the same thing, and thought it was because of the added number of birds in the coop. However, I couldn't quite reconcile that because before they came I had as many as 16 birds without the problem.

Then I realized what was going on. The meat birds don't get out and about like the layers do. They just hang around the coop and eat, occasionally venturing out to swipe a few bits of scratch from right outside the door. That, I realized, was the difference. The layers went out to forage and didn't leave their messes all in the coop - they scattered them wherever they foraged. The meat birds on the other hand fouled the nest. They didn't spread the wealth, so to speak. They keep most of it right there in the coop, where it adds... or should I say piles... up quickly.

When all is said and done, I may use dual purpose birds when raising for meat from here on, culling the roos to the dinner table. At least they'll get out and not mess things up quite so badly. Or quickly.