Eggs!

Our chickens have finally started laying eggs!  We happened to find our first egg the very day I had made bread, so we had a yummy dinner of toast and eggs.  (That first egg was small enough that Caleb, Seth, Makelle and I each ate a single bite, and then we had to cook up some eggs from the grocery store, but not for much longer! :)

(Makelle managed to drop the egg on the short walk from the coop to the kitchen, but luckily it only cracked and didn't break all the way, so we still got to eat it.)

These chickens sounded so fun when we started with them back in April, but they have really been more of a disaster.  Two of our chickens died when the neighbor's dog found a hole in the fence and came to attack our flock... apparently you should not live next door to trained bird hunting dogs if you want to raise free range chickens that wander your yard.  The poor dogs go crazy trying to find their way into our yard and the other day they finally managed to succeed.  :(  In addition to losing a couple of the chickens, two of the three pullets we bought turned out to really be roosters.  As much as we liked them and had gotten attached having watched them grow up, they had to go.  We are pretty sure we are zoned agricultural, but the neighbors are not, and they seemed annoyed.  Maybe in the future we will try to breed our own new chicks every spring, but for now we are going to stick with hens, so we found our little roosters a new home.  And luckily found a lady in Centerville that was selling some chickens that were born about the same time as ours so we got a couple replacements.

One guy who came to take our Easter Egger rooster, picked him up, tucked him under his arm, wrapped his free hand around the bird's neck and started to twist it backwards.  Then he pauses to ask us if we want him to put him to sleep.

"No!  Not in front of my kids!"

He looks confused and says, "are you sure, my grandkids like to watch."

"What?! No, nope they don't want to see that, you can do what you want with him when you get home, but not here."

Still looking confused he pauses, tilts his head and then, "Oh!  No!  We are going to keep him to breed with our hens, I really am going to put him to sleep, watch."

He then proceeds to tuck the head under the wing, hold the bird on both sides and rock him back and forth for about 10 seconds.  Then he lays the bird on the ground it flops down, not moving at all.  A couple seconds later he pokes it with his foot and our Easter Egger hopped right up.  Fascinating... who knew you could put a chicken into a comatose state for transporting them?  Apparently we still have a lot to learn about our little pets.  But really don't tell me you wouldn't have jumped to the same conclusion I did, I think my assumption was perfectly warranted.  I was quite relieved I was wrong though.

Anyway, despite all our chicken drama, they have been fun to have around.  We love hanging out in the backyard and watching them wander around pecking at the ground.  They are funny little creatures and now that we have them figured out and have reinforced the fence, they really do require little to no maintenance. We don't have to feed them at all, they are eating what appears to be random crap from around our yard and they found a broken sprinkler head that pools on top, it must have a really slow leak or something, that they drink from.

At first we would spend a good 15 minutes looking like idiots chasing the chickens around the yard at night trying to catch them to put them back in the coop before we went in to put the kids to bed.  Then one night we were out late and didn't get them put away before we left and we came home to find them all settled in their coop, waiting for us to lock the door.  Oh the annoyance and embarrassment we could have saved ourselves had we known they would do that automatically every night.  Like I said, we are learning though and its been a fun experiment.