Freak Eggs

Our chickens have been laying for over a month now, and it's still so exciting to go down to the coop, open up the side door of the hen house, and look in the nesting boxes for eggs.  Especially now that we're getting freak eggs!  You open up that little yellow door and you never know what you're going to find.

About a week after our first couple chickens started laying, we found this egg:

I walked into the kitchen that morning to get my coffee, saw that egg sitting on the counter, and wondered, "Why is it so pale?  And what are those speckles?"  So I poked the egg to see if the speckles were part of the shell or just some dirt... and it was squishy!  The egg was squishy because there was NO SHELL.  It was a perfectly formed egg - which we know because we cut it open to check - it just never formed a hard shell.  My mom said she found another egg without a shell the next morning, but it broke inside the hen house before she could collect it.  So gross.

Our chickens have been laying eggs in a huge variety of sizes, shapes, and colors:

The top left egg is very pale and very small, and it's obviously a freak egg because it has a little nipple on the top.  I mean seriously, that's just not right.  I think it was the very first egg for one of our chickens and took her by surprise, because I found it in the sand outside the hen house.  When I found it, I told the chickens, "Whoever did this, this is incorrect.  Try again."  They keep trying every day, but they still don't quite have it down yet.

Look at the top right egg in the picture above.  It's huge!  And guess what we found inside it...

Two yolks!  We found another giant egg a few days later and it was a double-yoker too!  I measured two of the eggs collected that day, and the regular brown egg was about 2 inches long.  The freak egg was almost 3 inches long!  I suspect Mary Lou is responsible for the huge eggs, not only because she is a Brahma (which is a bigger chicken that lays bigger eggs), but also because she herself is a freak.  It only makes sense for a freak chicken to lay freak eggs, but what do I know?

Here is a whole carton of eggs we've collected:

Now that our chickens' systems are in full gear, we've been getting one to three eggs every day, and we've filled up this one-and-a-half-dozen carton about three times in the past month.  We like to save them up until the weekend and then have a special breakfast with just our chickens' eggs.  We've actually heard the chickens laying eggs, and it's hilarious.  They start honking and squawking and fussing... then it stops as suddenly as it started.  The chicken emerges from the hen house like nothing even happened, and then there's a warm egg left in the nesting box.

Treehouse to Coop

My family moved into our house about 27 years ago.  I just turned 25.  When I was very little, my dad and two brothers built a treehouse.  I guess building it was just supposed to be a bonding experience because they didn't use the treehouse very much, and they certainly wouldn't let me play in it when I was big enough.  So it's been sitting down in the yard for over two decades, rotting away and being used only by a family of raccoons for a while.  Eventually we started throwing yard junk down there to help keep it out of the rain.  This is what the treehouse looked like five months ago before Mission Chicken Coop began:

Step one was to remove all the junk from underneath:

Now we actually have access to the treehouse again!  The next step involved convincing my boyfriend to climb up into that nasty, rotting treehouse and demolish it.  For free.  Well, we fed him.  And I supervised the demolition.  So first he took the treehouse door down and knocked off the front side of the structure:

Slowly but surely, all four sides and the roof came down.  The left side of the structure was the last to be demolished, and he was able to knock it down in one big section.  This picture doesn't show what's really happening here, but when he knocked the side down, it got stuck on a single nail.  A single nail is holding this whole side of the treehouse up!  That was one stubborn twenty-some-year-old nail.

I think this is where we left it after day one:

After one weekend, the treehouse was almost completely taken down by our one-man demo crew:

The biggest obstacles in Mission Chicken Coop were the trees.  I guess we started this project right in the busiest part of the tree-cutting season, so it took at least a couple months to get a tree cutting service to not only give us an estimate but to actually show up and follow through with the job.  This root was pretty difficult too - and it broke the polesaw!

Waiting to get the trees cut down put us on pause for quite a while, but once they were out of the way, my dad and brother put up the new roof:

During this process, the original structure was ripped down to the retaining wall (which was then reinforced), the six vertical posts (which were cut down to fit the new roof), and some of the bracing around the ceiling.  Also, there was nothing we could do about that big boulder, but I like it there.

After the roof went up, the floor needed to go down.  We had to fill in the side where that tree root had been in order to level out the ground.  My dad and brothers added wire fencing around the entire floor and covered up the edges so they wouldn't hurt any chicken feet.  We also custom-built a door to fit the space so it was wide enough to carry the hen house through.

Not only did we need to build the chicken coop, but we also had to build the hen house.  And that was primarily my dad's project.  My mom and I did research and had many discussions about what we wanted our hen house to include, but it was really my dad who drew up the plans and made them a reality.  Here is a picture of the inside of the hen house before we did any painting and before we installed the nesting boxes and put down the bedding (the chickens LOVE those uneven roosting bars):

Start with a treehouse, then subtract the second level, add a new roof, new floor, new vertical beams, new door, enclose the whole structure, then carry in a hen house, and this is what you get:

But we're not done yet!  After everything was built, we had to paint and weatherproof the new roof and hen house.  We also added little strips of wire fencing around the spaces near the roof and above the door so no critters could climb in.  My dad brought in two truckloads of sand that we started to spread on the floor to cover the wire.

We installed some extra hooks to hold our rake and chairs up off the ground (so they wouldn't get pooped on!).

We also installed a couple little shelves on the front side so we can set our coffee cups down when we sit in the coop with the chickens.  And now it's all done!  After more than four months, Mission Chicken Coop is complete.  The chickens seem really happy to be in their new home and we're having a lot of fun sitting in the coop with them every day.  When they squawk at us, we squawk back.

Just so you can see a quick comparison of the before and after, here's that first picture again:

Our first eggs!

I got home from work today, made a cup of coffee, and took it down to the chicken coop to hang out with the girls.  They were squawking and pecking at my toes and being especially rowdy.  At some point, I decided to check out the inside of the hen house, so I stuck my head halfway through the front door, looked to my right toward the nesting boxes, then looked to the left and saw... omg, what is that round thing?  It's an egg!  Omg, there's another one!  Our first two eggs!

Our two Amber Links (the white chickens) seem a little more mature than the other chickens, so I suspect they are the ones who laid the first two eggs today.  We're almost positive the hen house was eggless yesterday, which means two chickens are mature enough to lay.  The girls are only four months old, so we didn't think they would be laying until the fall.

Bernice, did you lay this egg?

What about you, Oneita?

You're supposed to lay them inside the nesting boxes!  I guess they did pretty good for their first eggs, even though they laid them in the wrong part of the hen house.

Release the chickens!

Today was moving day!  The chickens finally got to move outside into their new home.  The chicken coop isn't 100% complete, but the last bit of painting and modifications can be done while they're down there.

Here is the hen house!  It came out so cute!  The purple door is for the chickens to go in and out.  The green door is an access door when we need to clean inside the hen house.

Once the chickens start laying eggs, we will collect them through this yellow door:

Here are the nesting boxes where the chickens are supposed to lay their eggs:

This is what the nesting boxes look like from inside:

We put in two perches at different levels inside the hen house, which was the first thing the chickens wanted to try after we carried them out to their new home:

Then they finally emerged from their new house:

And tried out their new feeder:

Viola paused to contemplate something on the ramp up to the hen house:

While Bailey politely asked to be let into the run ("I just want to sniff their feathers, I swear!"):

They kept racing around the sand, poofing up their feathers, pecking on everything (including my toes), and Viola even caught a fly straight out of the air!  They seem to be having a good first day in their new home.

Also, props to my dad for designing and building the hen house and to my mom for painting it.  Props to my brothers for helping build the chicken coop structure, and to my boyfriend for hauling 1.3 tons of sand down there.  They all did a lot more than that during this process, but they all helped it come out amazing!

Mary Lou has some problems

The weather-people keep calling for rain and thunderstorms, so the chickens haven't been out much lately.  We took them out a few days ago and let them roam the yard freely.

We sat on the playground forever waiting for those wimps to leave the crate, so we had to toss out some treats.  They took the bait!  They finally ventured forth and seemed a little curious...

We thought they would be so excited to have so much free space compared to their crate!  But no.  They walked 5 feet into the corner of the yard and stayed there for the rest of their field trip.  Wow, exciting choice, girls!  Those are some adventurous birds there.

And here's Mary Lou with that stupid look stuck on her face.  I don't know what her deal is, but every time I look at her, she's making that dumb face.  Open mouth, dead eyes.  I can't stand her.  I mean, maybe I'm being too hard on her.  Mary Lou is a fine enough chicken, but she's just got one of those faces that makes me furious.  Haven't you ever met someone whose face just makes you angry as soon as you see them?  Well she's the chicken version of that.

Here's Oneita, who always loves to find a good perch spot from which she can survey her kingdom:

You might be able to see some feathers on the far left of that last picture.  That's Mary Lou.  She sat over there forever with that dumb look on her face.  Before she settled there, she kept trying to follow the flock but kept getting stuck on the other side of the crate.  The flock left the crate and she was stuck inside, unable to figure out how to get through the side bars.  Then she finally figured out there was a door and got out, but by then, the flock was heading back inside the crate and Mary Lou was the only one left outside.  Then they all switched again.  Mary Lou has some problems.

Throwback Thursday

I thought it would be fun to do a #tbt post, so here are some cute pictures of the chickens when they were tiny!

Bernice... always ready to strike a pose:

Mr. Helen... before my brother magically and tragically turned her into a rooster:

Oneita... during our quality bonding time when she liked to perch on my wrist and survey her kingdom:

Mr. Helen has gone to the farm

A few days after I last posted, my mom and I went out to my brother's house to see the chicken tractor he built - which came out really awesome, by the way.  We were checking out his chickens, and as soon as we saw his three Partridge Rocks, our hopes were ruined.  His three were all still fairly small and had tiny combs, which means that our tall, beautiful Mr. Helen, with his big, fabulous comb, is definitely a rooster.

Here's a good picture of the colors in his feathers.  See the green near the end of his wings?  He's so beautiful.

Unfortunately, we're not allowed to have roosters in town, and since he's quite vocal compared to our other chickens, we knew we had to find him a new home.  Not just get rid of him - we didn't want to send him off to the slaughterhouse, and we didn't think we could actually kill him ourselves.  We wanted to find him a real home, someplace where he could roam free and happy, and where he could keep the name Mr. Helen.

Apparently the chicken forums are packed full of offers for free roosters, and no one seems to want them, except maybe for dinner.  Then my mom called Spence, from Spence's Farm, and he said, "Sure, bring him over any afternoon!  We'll put him in the chicken pen."  We really wanted to keep Mr. Helen long enough to hear him crow, but my mom didn't want to wait too long and risk Spence changing his mind.  So we took Mr. Helen over there yesterday afternoon.

"What?!  You're going to leave me here?!"

We thought Mr. Helen's comb was awesome, but check out the comb on this dude!

Here is Mr. Helen having his first altercation with a bigger rooster:

But Mr. Helen stood his ground and I was proud of him.  I think he'll be okay.  He just has to establish himself in the pecking order.

After that was over, Mr. Helen started roaming around, checking out where everything is in his new home.

This is the chicken pin from outside the fence:

And here is the winter coop:

So that's Mr. Helen's new home!  As we were leaving, we felt kind of bad that our other chickens couldn't live out there on that big farm, but they'll have their own awesome chicken coop soon!