Venus
In Brief
last updated 3.10.09
Hatched: December 2006 (estimated)
Weight: 4.61 kg
Breed: Australorp
Current Status: laying
Total number of eggs: 282
Biggest egg: 104 g (double-yolker)
Smallest egg: 53 g
Average weight: 68.6 g
The Arrival
Venus was bought, along with Ella, at the Ashburton Fancier’s auction in 2007. We hadn’t intended to get two birds, but there were no single Australorps to be had. The original plan was to keep one and sell the other. It just didn’t quite work out that way …
The Name
For a while, we toyed with the possibility of naming the two girls Serena and Venus, after the Williams sisters. But I’ve known a few Serenas who I didn’t much like, so I didn’t want to name one of our girls that. To cap it all off, one of the few ways we could tell the two girls apart was by shape – Venus was much more voluptuous looking than her sister. So Venus she became.
She did have one oddity about her appearance – her eyes.
Laying
It was the day before the winter solstice – June 21st, 2007. There was a huge amount of cackling going on outside, and when I went out to check, it turned out to be Venus making most of the noise. I had a look around, but couldn’t see what it was that had stirred the girls up, so I just leaned in to collect the breakfast dish. That’s when I saw it. It was a super frosty morning, and there was a small area in the litter that had steam rising from it. A brown egg! Longish, with both ends quite blunt (rather than one pointy and one rounded). 59 grams. Venus had started laying!
It took quite a while for Venus to get it in to her head that eggs should be laid in the nestbox. She began making herself little nests on the floor of the house, which wasn’t ideal. We got some nesteggs, to encourage her to lay in the appropriate place. Didn’t seem to make much difference. She’d look in the nestbox, maybe even play with the eggs a bit. And then just lay her eggs wherever. And cackle extremely loudly, for up to an hour afterwards.
One of her more frustrating laying habits was to carry on as though she’d laid her egg, then suddenly get caught short and lay it out in the run. Not so bad if we found it before it got covered in scritched litter, but … on one occasion I found her egg by kneeling on it. Ugh. It was mid-July before she started using the nest properly. And even now, a year on, she’s still prone to laying in the run.
Having said that, she was a good layer in her pullet year. She laid 179 eggs in 253 days, with an average weight of 68 g. And started in the middle of winter, with no supplemental light. From 1.2 to 1.8 kilograms of eggs, every month. Not bad. That’s why we referred to her as “the machine”.
Laying Oddities
She’s been prone to laying the odd soft-shelled egg – not uncommon in pullets, but possibly a sign that she doesn’t metabolise calcium as well as the others. On one particularly memorable occasion (27.6.07) she came out, did her “I’ve laid an egg! I’ve laid an egg! Oh hang on, no I haven’t” routine, then squatted, did a big poo, squatted again, and ejected an egg with no shell or membrane. Yolk and white, straight out on top of the poo. Sigh!
She holds the record for our biggest egg. Ella’s first egg (2.7.07) was a 94g double-yolker, which Venus topped four days later – 96g.
But on October 16, 2007, she went even bigger – 104g. Ouch!
And Then
Venus started molting in March (2008). Her last egg was on February 29th. She looked absolutely awful – there were big clumps of fluffy black feathers piling up in the house and in the run, and she looked like she’d gone three rounds with a feather-plucker. Poor girl. But they grew back reasonably quickly.
That’s when we noticed something quite weird. Some of her feathers had odd little white flecks in them. (The full post about this can be seen here.) More and more white has appeared, and now her legs are getting pale too (they should be a dark slatey grey-black, like Ella). We have no idea what’s going on! But it’s quite possible that she will continue getting paler, and end up as a white … Australorp? Sigh!
