(With gratuitous chooks-roaming-the-garden photos.)

A good day in ChookeNZ-land! (Although you might want to skip the next paragraph if you’re of a queasy disposition.)

We took Poppy to Veronica today for another check. We’re winning! She’s on her third type of antibiotics (twice daily this time), with us cleaning the caseous pus out of her mouth every evening (which involves a towel, a pair of tweezers, cotton buds and lots of swearing – human and galline) and smearing the wound site with manuka honey ointment night and morning. And yesterday we got a huge lump – about half the size of my little-finger nail – out of the top ‘chamber’ of the wound. I swear the lump went down by a good two thirds, just from that. (We were going to take it in to show to the vet, but Poppy ate it. Eeeew!) Anyway, she’s definitely improving. The pus is pretty much all surface now, so it’s just a matter of keeping everything clean and making sure the infection is well and truly cleared up before she stops her antibiotics. Woohoo!

We’ve also managed to break Venus out of her broody spell. She’s spent the days in the broody coop with the door to the nesting area shut, so she’s bored, secure, and unable to nest. It only took three days of doing that for her to snap out of it. Brilliant! (And ironic.) Because she was within sight of the girls during the day, and back with them as soon as laying was finished (when we’d shut the pophole to everyone) there was no issue of them forgetting who she was. Now we just have to wait for her to start laying again.

Reintroducing Frida to the flock is taking a bit longer than we’d hoped. We’ve moved Bessie in with her, which is going well. And Claire and Lily are fine with her too. (She’s gone above poor Lily in the pecking order, but it’s not been a traumatic adjustment.) Neoli and Poppy, however, want nothing to do with her. They all bristle and hackle and pace up and down the mesh threatening violence.  Ella’s done the odd hackle-and-bristle too, but it’s much less frequent. (Or convincing.) We’ve tried having Bessie and Frida on the lawn and giving either Poppy or Neroli some very closely supervised interaction with her, but they’re still leaping into agro-mode as soon as they realise who it is. (And yes, Frida is the instigator as often as not.) After Poppy’s infection, I’m not in any hurry to get them to sort it out. They’ll get tired of it eventually.

Well today was the day that we hoped Frida would be able to have her final bit of metal removed. Unfortunately she’s still not well-healed enough for that – probably not helped by the fact that she’s laying regularly! Oh well. We’ll take her back in three weeks’ time, and see how things look then.

In the interests of not having Frida (or Jo, who’s home with her the most) a complete basket case, we’ve started giving Frida big chunks of the day outside in the broody coop. Lots of grass to nibble, and some breeze ruffling her petticoats. (Hurray!) But she’s still not allowed to scritch, or to dustbathe. (Bah.)

Fingers crossed for rapid healing and lovely weather!

Actually she’s been back since the 11th, but with Venus you don’t want to speak too soon. She is the queen of strange laying behaviour, popping out shell-less eggs with monotonous regularity at times. And indeed the first egg she laid this month seems to have been a thin-shelled ‘involuntary overnight emission’ (as we call eggs that chooks lay from the perch while roosting – thankfully an infrequent occurrence). Somebody trod on it in the rush to get out in the morning, but enough was recovered to weigh it (68 g), so it counts! 

She used to be a black hen...

Now she’s up to 10 eggs laid, including one thin-shelled one that was too smashed up to be weighed. The rest have been pretty good ‘normal’ eggs. Normal for Venus means perfectly symmetrical – no blunt or pointed ends. Both ends have exactly the same curvature. You’re supposed to store eggs with the blunt end up (this is where the air sac is), but with Venus we just have to guess…

And the mixed blessing? Well, there’s a lot of cackling and false alarms when Venus gets back into laying. She’s a big girl with a loud voice, and plenty of stamina. On the Sunday before she started laying (the 9th) she cackled on and off (more on than off) for the whole afternoon, and more of the same on Monday too. It has an effect on you that is reminiscent of the barking of a bored, chained up dog, or a teething baby.

By the way, as you can see from the recent pic on this page, her colour change from black to white has continued with the recent moult. Her sister Ella is still solidly black.

Along with all the new pages and updates of late, we’ve added quite a few back-dated posts about happenings in July. Check out the following, if you haven’t already spotted them:

• Claire returning to laying with a strange egg.
• Bessie having proper moult for the first time, and in the depths of winter too.
• Claire having sexuality issues.
• Lily returning to laying after her moult.
• Frida’s tribulations.
• Neroli laying her first egg.

We's been busy...

Apologies for the interrupted (okay, non-existent) service of late – it’s been a busy time for all in the ChookeNZ household. We resolve to do better from now! (Life permitting …)

Continuing the (early) spring spruce-up of ChookeNZ, we’re pleased to announce that The Egg Pages have been updated for the first time since December last year.

A pullet double-yolker in the pan

Four more double yolkers have been recorded; Ella’s 26 consecutive days laying feat given its due recognition; and nearly 500 more eggs added to the chooks’ totals.

On that subject:

The total number of eggs our various chooks have laid (while resident in the ChookeNZ backyard) is 1987, which is 165.6 dozen.

If they were all packed into half-dozen egg cartons and stacked up, the pile would be 23 m tall - nearly as high a a 9-storey building (see Note 1).

If all those eggs were laid placed end-to-end the line would be 119 m long - which would take Usain Bolt about 11.4 seconds to run past on current form (see Note 2).

Amazing, innit?!

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Note 1: Assuming 8.5 ft (2.6 m) floor spacing.

Note 2: Based on 9.58 seconds for 100 m (August 2009). Actually he’d be faster than this as his average speed is increasing substantially all the way to the end of the race.

Just hatched added: The ChookeNZ Research Centre!

This is where we’ll put pages that have a research or scientific flavour to them. Right now there are two pages that provide an analysis of how the weight of our four 2007 pullets (Frida, Lily, Poppy and Claire) declined and recovered during moulting.

In a few weeks we’ll add a page that shows how egg production for our girls has varied over the last 12 months. All terribly exciting!

Take a look at it, and maybe even leave us a comment with an idea for our next research project.

A couple of notable events last month, leading to a general improvement in egg productivity. Hooray!

The most significant event was that little Neroli, the only girl we kept from the 2008 chicks (the ‘Peebles’) started laying this month, on the 23rd. By month end she had popped out five more, and seems to have settled into laying well. We’re always a bit nervous when pullets start, as Beatrice, our Barnevelder pullet died of egg-yolk peritonitis after laying only eight eggs. At the time of writing Neroli is up to 15, and is the same precocious pullet as ever. She’s a cackler too, announcing to the world that she’s laid (and occasionally that she’d like to lay, but someone else – usually Lily – has beaten her to it), but only for a burst of a few minutes.

Here’s the graph, with a new column appearing for Neroli!

You’ll see a couple of other features there too – Lily having returned to the sisterhood of the cloaca with nine eggs since the 19th, plus two for Claire. (You can read about her current weird laying and other behaviour  elsewhere.) The stand-out, and winner of the Golden Cloaca for July, is … Poppy! (Frida was laying well too, but stopped (not surprisingly!) when she broke her leg.)

With the lengthening days we remain ever hopeful of our Australorps returning to the lay in August, and Bessie too, when she’s finished moulting. Assuming she doesn’t go broody …

Claire laid her first egg after moulting today, but it wasn’t her typical brown and speckly type. It was something rather peculiar:

It’s an intact shell-less egg (63 g), but with a weird membranous tail hanging off it. The tail is sealed and fluid filled (presumably with more egg-white).

In our experience and from reading elsewhere, occasional strange eggs are normal, especially for pullets or for hens coming back into lay (like in this case). If you only buy eggs at the supermarket you get the impression that all eggs are of uniform size, shape and coloration, but of course all the oddities have been filtered out. In reality, all manner of strange things pop out.

Laying an egg really is a peculiar and miraculous thing!

PS: Claire followed this with a normal egg on the 14th of July (64 g), but nothing since…

For June I’m pleased to say we can report a recovery of sorts, as far as the laying stats are concerned. This month had Frida laying consistently, Bessie intermittently, and finally Poppy back into it at month-end. Hooray!

So there were 35 eggs for the month, and fears of having to purchase them were allayed. (It probably helped that Stewart was away on business for half the month, so the demand for an egg at breakfast was not present.) Here’s the June result in graphical form:

Still no indication of laying from Neroli yet – she’ll probably need the days to start to lengthen a bit before she feels the urge. Claire and Lily look to be recovering well from their moult – Claire in particular now has outrageous comb and wattles! So she shouldn’t be far away. And still we wonder about the two Australorps – they look in good condition, finished moulting ages ago, but aren’t showing any signs of laying yet.

Well our hopes for April were somewhat optimistic! No hens came back into lay, and Lily laid intermittently before finally stopping (and getting into her moult) on the 24th. Only our ever-reliable Bessie was in lay for the whole month – every second day. In the end we only had 27 eggs for all of April. The graph does not make good viewing:

And what’s more we had 13 eggless days this month. In comparison,we had just 19 eggless days between June 2007 (when Bessie laid her first egg) and the end of March 2009. Partly this April result was because Lily and Bessie got perfectly synchronised: from the 10th to the 24th they both laid on the same day then took the next day off.

Surely we’ll get a few more hens laying in May?!