It’s been another good month of laying, as you’d expect this time of year, although with some spring-broodiness starting to appear in the flock now. Venus was first to go, taking 11 days off in mid-month, but still managing 16 eggs in total. Ella and Poppy then went broody towards month-end, dropping them back to 15 and 18 eggs each respectively. But this has been easily the longest period of laying for Poppy without going broody.

Claire keeps popping them out every second day, pretty much like clockwork, and ended up with 14, while Bessie plodded on with 17. However the best performers were the three Dorking girls, with Lily on 20, Neroli on 22 and Frida taking Golden Cloaca Award this month with 25. (No sharing with Poppy and Venus like last month!) Here’s the graph:

So 147 eggs for the month – actually one better than last month. This means we have had consistent surpluses of eggs of late, so have been selling and bartering a few dozen here and there. It’s the girls way of contributing to their feed bill!

Ella’s eggs are the largest of our hens’, with an average size of 71 g (check out this page to see where that puts them on the standard commercial grades). They’re also the most indulgent to eat, as the yolk seems to make up a greater proportion of the egg than the other girls’ eggs, and the whites are thick and cling to the yolk. All this means they make a lovely fried or poached egg, and are our first choice when we’re having eggs that way.

But, as you’ll be aware if you’re a regular viewer of our monthly laying summaries, Ella isn’t the most productive of our girls. In fact in her first season laying (i.e her pullet year – supposedly their most productive time) she laid a total of 100 eggs. (Considering that her breed still holds the world record for most number of eggs laid by a single hen in a calendar year without artificial light – over 360 eggs – this is very definitely sub par.) Last season she did slightly bit better (108 eggs), and this season hasn’t been too bad (27) so far – although it still leaves her well behind the others, except Claire (who has an excuse). As a comparison, Frida (not from a high-laying breed) laid 205 in her first season.

Given that her peak production is in spring and early summer, we’ve come to the conclusion that Ella’s eggs are effectively a seasonal delicacy, like asparagus, whitebait, or Bluff oysters. So we tend to value them that way too, and they rarely get sold or bartered away! (Right now we’ve got seven stashed in the fridge, all laid in the last 10 days or so …)

Broody-Ella

And they’ll have to last for a while – she’s just gone broody. And she’s a determined and grumpy broody hen, so who knows how long before we get another egg!

Almost let this pass – one year ago today, Poppy hatched out the peebles! So happy 1st birthday Neroli, and to Princess/Pinkie, Sylvie/Cleo, and Rachel/Blue.

She spread her wings and fluffed them wide
and filled the nest from side to side.
“The urge has come upon me!” cried
Our noodle-brained Poppy.
“Get me some eggs to sit on,
and then bugger off!” said she.

(JP, with apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson )

Yes, it had to happen. In considerably less time than it took me to compose the above, Poppy has gone from normal to broody fluff-monster.

Oh well. We got 92 eggs from her before going broody this time. Which is 60 more than she’s managed before. And Venus has returned to laying … (conspiracy, anyone?!)

(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.

As part of Frida’s rehabilitation, we’ve been giving her access to the lawn, hedge and herb bed. It proved so popular (and surprisingly un-destructive) that we’ve started making a point of giving everyone some supervised lawn time.

It really is a gorgeous sight. Grazing the lawn is popular. But the girls seem especially keen on the sorrel and the self-sown winter purslane in my raised herb beds, so they’re both getting quite a thrashing.

And then there is the utter bliss that is scritching through the piles of decaying hay along the hedge …

A few words of wisdom for those of you who are keen to try it with your own chooks:

• Make sure the yard is secure before you let anyone out. (Obvious, I know.)
• Ideally, try to let them out late in the afternoon, when they are calm and full – your garden will survive better if this is a treat rather than the best chance for a meal.
• Have a container with some sort of treat – meat, mealworms fruit, grain, whatever – somewhere handy but out of sight so that you can easily get the girls to come to you in an emergency.
• Cover anything vulnerable or poisonous. The girls will learn pretty quickly what is out of bounds (a scolding voice and a calm but firm push away from the item in question seems to do the trick for us) but you don’t want to be worrying about too many things at once.
• Try not to let too many out at once. We find four to five pretty manageable, but it will depend on the birds in question.
• Consider flock dynamics: if you have the top of the pecking order out with one of the bottom, it’s more likely to cause trouble than if you keep to similar status birds. (You don’t want anyone being chased. Keep it calm.)
• Sit down nearby, and enjoy!

What with one thing and another, a few quite important laying milestones have been reached without us having a chance to post about them individually.

Firstly, Bessie clicked over 400 eggs (since we’ve owned her) on the 19th of September. She lays a bit less frequently now she’s getting older, but usually manages an egg every second day or so, and was our only chook to keep us supplied in early winter.

Then, on the 9th of October Frida hit the 300 egg mark. Pretty impressive considering what she’s been through over the last few months! Very good laying for a Dorking, but these are a good laying strain. On the same day Venus hit a milestone for the less metrically-minded: a double gross (288 eggs). And promptly went broody (although she’s come out of it now, but isn’t yet laying again).

The day after that, Poppy laid her 200th egg, and has now laid 88 without going broody. Remember that in the past she has only managed 30-odd before the broodiness kicks in. This is especially good going for her, considering that, like Frida, she has had more than her share of drama of late.

Good going those girls!

We gave the girls an Omelette-cake to celebrate the Peeps and Sammies’ second birthday yesterday. (For those who wonder about such things, it was a Spanish Omelette, and used seven egg whites that we had left over from other cooking, plus one extra egg, some cubed roast potato, and some cubed roast lamb. )

It took about three minutes to completely disappear. As you can see from the photo, there was much food-running, with girls carrying chunks of omelette bigger than their own heads off to a corner where they could wolf it down (relatively) unmolested.

Having had our longest ever spell without anyone going broody, Venus has decided to return us to normality. She’s always been prone to making ungodly noises – seagull shrieks to greet us, shrieks of fury at being disturbed on the nest (accompanied by some truly vicious pecks), and more shrieks at night if we have the back door open too long for her liking, or if someone is perched where she wants to be. And these noises have been getting louder, more frequent, and more unpleasant. And now she’s added the broody bok-bok, and taken to stomping around looking like she plans to murder someone (entirely possible) when she can’t get into the nestbox.

Even if we did want to raise another batch of chicks this year, Venus is the last hen we’d use. For one thing, she’s pretty clumsy. Huge and fluffy, but clumsy – stands on her own eggs quite often. God knows how chicks would survive. And she’s the least people-friendly of all our girls. Even Ella will tolerate humans, and sometimes even seem to like being stroked. But Venus is the last one to come up, the first to back away, and the only one who has drawn blood (admittedly this only happens – so far – when she’s on the nest, but that’s the point). You have to assume that any chicks she raised would be pretty feral. So it’s a matter of keeping her away from the nestbox, and waiting for her to snap out of it. Poor girl. Hormones really do mess her around.

And to round-out our weekend, we’ve got Frida installed in one end of the Winter Garden run, with the bach house attached for her sleeping quarters. She and Poppy have spent some time pacing up and down, threatening murder and carnage (sigh), but hopefully the novelty of doing so will wear off pretty soon.

Today is Lily, Frida, Claire and Poppy’s second birthday. Hard to believe it was two years ago that Bessie hatched her girls (the Peeps – the Sammies were hatched the same day, but not by us). This year we’ve decided not to hatch any chicks. There’s been more than enough drama with Frida’s leg and now Poppy’s lump. So we have to return to photographs to get our cute-fix. Awwwww!

So happy birthday Lily, Frida, Poppy and Claire, and happy birthday also to Jenny/Gytha and Cholet/ Esme, and to Alice and Cindy/Sally.

Worrying times. Last week, we noticed a swelling on the left side of Poppy’s face. Looking in her mouth (not an easy task) we could see a wound of some sort on the inside – on a human it would be just back from the corner of the lips.

We got her in to the vet (Veronika) next day. With the assistance of a vet nurse, Veronika managed to get a good look in, and to pull some debris (pus/dead tissue and detritus from Poppy’s day scritiching in the garden) out of the cavity.

Best guess is that it’s a wound from her fight with Neroli, and that it took a week before it became infected (or infected enough to be noticable). Or maybe she spiked herself on a stick or similar – it happens. It happened to Delilah.

Anyway, she was put on antibiotics for a week, and then we were to bring her back for a progress check. And it looked good for a while – we spent the last few days saying “I’m sure it looks smaller. Doesn’t it look smaller to you?” to each other.

Unfortunately any improvement was only temporary, because today it looked as big as ever. So we went though the whole wound debridement thing again, and have a new batch of super-duper antibiotics to give her for another week. And the task of cleaning the wound out once a day ourselves.

So that’s where we are. Hoping like hell that we do a good enough job; hoping like hell that these antibiotics work; hoping like hell.

And trying not to think too often about Delilah.