Eggs (week ending 4/23): 40
Eggs (year to date): 704

It has been an interesting week. First, egg production has dropped 16% since last week. Some of the hens have got it into their heads that they're not going to lay in the coop unless they're locked in until late afternoon, so I've been obliging them.

There could be a couple of factors at work on this. One is that I haven't had the chance to do my spring cleaning of the coop yet. I've been in a community theater production, and we're remodeling the house to move my mother in in a couple of weeks, so I've been doing minimal maintenance on the coop. The other factor could be crowding. Once I get the meat birds and a few culls out of the way, things might pick up. Maybe it's both. Or maybe it's neither. Maybe they're just being obstinate.

The big project this week, such as it was, was to clean out the nursery and put the batch of 5-6 week olds in with the general population in preparation for an influx of chicks. The youngest, the Barred Plymouth Rocks, are the biggest fussbudgets of the batch. One keeps leaving the coop, and as soon as it gets a couple of feet away, it starts complaining loudly with a screech not unlike fingernails going down a chalkboard. I'm trying to think of an appropriate name for that one. I'm thinking of calling it "Michael Moore." I hope this screeching and complaining doesn't bode ill for their adult personalities - they're already beautiful birds and I'd love to keep them around.

Tuesday I received the week-old hatchlings from the fourth grade hatching project. There were 9 white leghorn chicks, and 16 mutt chicks, which I've tried to classify as follows:

Wyandotte Type
Black w/yellow spot on head (1)

Rhode Island Red Type
Rust w/yellow highlights, RIR type wing feathers (1)

Sex Link Types
Yellow w/pronounced chipmunk striping (3)
Yellow w/light chipmunk striping (3)
Yellow w/pale striping and dark V's on forehead (2)
Red w/pronounced chipmunk striping (2)
Red w/light wing saddle coloring (2)
Red w/darker wing tip markings (2)

With the chicks came a stack of thank-you notes. I've gotten them in the past for talking to classes about writing or advertising, and I love getting thank-yous from elementary students. These were no exception. There were a great many classic remarks, including once precocious student who "appreciated my perseverance" in helping with their hatching project.

One requirement from their teachers must have been to mention what they learned from the experience in the letter. Here are some of the more interesting things that the fourth-graders learned in 2005:

Chicks cute or not make messes so can not be pets.

I learned that new-born chicks are really stupid.

I learned that chicks start out as eggs and the cute little chicks are the ugly big chickens.

It was funny when they got out of the egg they fell and stuff like that.

I also learned that a chicken knows how to count to 18.

Some chicks need to grow into their feet!

I'm already planning to donate another batch of eggs for next year. I hope to have some small bantie eggs and some green Easter Eggers for next year.

Eggs (week ending 4/16): 48
Eggs (year to date): 664

Owing to having a part in a community theater production, I've been getting home to lock up the chickens after dark. Last Thursday night, after making sure the chookens were all locked up in their coop, I noticed that one of the young Easter Eggers and one of the meat birds were outside. I chased them back in, started to leave the barnyard...

...and discovered the half-eaten remains of another meat bird. It was wedged under the door of an unused stall of the barn as if something had tried to drag it inside. So I turned on the light and opened the door, and there in the corner was Possum #3.

I shut the door. Ran into the house. Grabbed my .22 pistol. Ran back out, turned on the light in the stall. Possum still there. Took care of the problem.

We're down to six meat birds now. I guess I should have dressed these three possums out and thrown them on the grill to make up for the food they're taking out of the mouths of my family. And that's just the meat part. They've also eaten three Buff Orpington, two Barred Rock, and one Easter Egger chick. So egg production took a hit, too.

Well, at least I have some more chicks coming - the mutt birds and some White Leghorns from the chick hatching project I donated some eggs to. For now I'm still disgruntled about those accursed possums.

At least they can't carry off my daughter's kid goats. See? There's something to be grateful for.

Eggs (week ending 4/9): 44
Eggs (year to date): 616

Before yesterday afternoon, the highlight since my last post was taking the Cornish Rock meat birds and two of the larger Easter Eggers out of the nursery on Saturday and putting them in with the general population. They were all panicky at first, trying to huddle their way back into the nursery by where the heat lamp hangs - but they slowly got used to the idea of having more space - and a bigger feeder and waterer handy. One of the EE's got out of the coop but seemed too stupid to get back in and had to be helped. A couple of the Rocks got out and struggled to get up the step into the coop, but they made it. There was a bit of mild pecking going on, but for the most part everything worked out.

This would have been it except for what happened when I went to gather eggs yesterday. I have a couple of renegade hens who have been laying in a part of the barn near the goat manger, in an old food tub that has a little hay in the bottom of it. I walked into that part of the barn to check for eggs and thought I saw a cat in the goat stall with Clover.

I looked again. It wasn't a cat. It was a kid.

So I ran to the stall and there was Clover, standing there with what my wife and I later identified as twin does. They were both dry and fluffy, but the remains of their umbilical cords were still damp, and Clover's tail was still wet, so it hadn't been that long since they were born.

We weren't expecting this for at least two more weeks, maybe even a month. Now we're thinking that Clover was pregnant the first time we brought her back from the breeders.

Naturally my daughter was thrilled. Their bodies are colored more like their mother, while they have their father's facial colors. They're a nice mix between the Swiss and American Alpine.

Once I got over the shock, I was thrilled.

So I put up some chicken wire in the new stall where I saw that it was needed, put the two new kids inside, and Clover had no problem going in to care for her babies. Then we checked the goat book and found out that we had done everything wrong when it came to the birth of these kids. But as my daughter put it, goats have been doing this sort of thing for thousands of years, so it all came naturally.

The other goats didn't seem to be upset by the new arrivals. I still moved the family to keep the little ones from being trampled during the morning food rush, though.

Up next: perhaps dividing the new stall into sub-stalls for the other goats;getting the farm registered with the American Dairy Goat Association, naming the new goatlets; and, as my daughter said, "Making a huge order from Hoegger Goat Supply" (for milking supplies).

And, of course, naming the little critters.

One goat down. One or two more to go.

Eggs for last of March (3/27 - 3/31): 33
Eggs for March, 2005: 181
Eggs for first of April (4/1 - 4/2): 18
Eggs (year to date): 572

I'm happy to report that the incidents of missing and half-eaten chicks has stopped with the dispatching of the second possum. Last weekend I added another measure to frustrate would-be predators, but mostly I did it to control chicken movement: I surrounded the tack room with a five foot high length of chicken wire.

You see, the White Rock has become absolutely psychotic, being on the bottom of the pecking order as it is, and being constantly put-upon by the roosters. It had taken to hanging out in the tack room all day with one of the older reds. Besides their unpleasant little messes, they managed to scatter most of a bale of straw that was to go into the coop, and they had taken to laying eggs in the tack room doorway.

Naturally, putting up the wire took care of that problem. Now apparently these two chooks were also inviting their friends to tea parties in the tack room, because no sooner had I gotten the wire up across one stretch of fence than a couple of the Wyandottes showed up and clucked their disapproval at what had happened to keep them out of their little chicken paradise. I half-expected the chickens to try to run into the tack room and hit the fence, but when they walked up and saw the new wire strung up, they understood right away what the implications were. At least, as much as a chicken is capable of understanding, anyway.

Another nice thing about this fence is that it has cut down on the consumption of cat food. Besides Cleo, the chickens were helping themselves to it... as was the remaining volunteer cat... as were the possums before they decided that chicks were fresher and more appetizing.

In other news, while installing the chicken wire, I learned a few interesting things about chicken reproduction. It is officially spring, after all, and love... well, lust... was in the air, and I had all sorts of reproductive activity going on around me on Saturday - but I'll spare the details in the interests of keeping this a family friendly venue.

Also, the while Silkie/Cochin cross - which my wife named Handsome because of his obvious good looks - also became a rooster in the last week or so. No, he hasn't crowed since he made that scraping noise back in the nursery (that I've heard anyway), but he has taken a definite interest in the Silkie/Cochin hens that share the yard with him. And yesterday he was squaring off against one of the Silver Laced Wyandottes, which makes me wonder if she was fending off his affections.

I have been talking about building a chicken tractor for my summer project, but now I'm thinking about building a broody house instead. It would give me a haven to take broody hens and their eggs, as well as a place to raise purchased chicks without losing any space in the chicken coop. I think I have a plan for it. There is a lot of appropriate scrap lumber around. All I need is a good location.

Finally, the professor who teaches the HTML class I'm taking announced the requirements for our final web page projects. Mine is definitely going to be a re-design of this site - and I already know what it's going to look like graphic-wise. There will be a handful of new content pages added, the existing ones will get the new look, and... I will probably move this page from Blogspot hosting onto my current web host. I'll keep you, uh, posted.