When Lori gave me the responsibility to gather the days catch of new eggs, she said that the hens were sneaky and that every day was like a never-ending Easter egg hunt without a map. But I didn’t realise just how sneaky.
Some hens laid ther eggs in the egg barn, where Lori had built cosy little nests for them. That was all well and simple. But most hens seemed to think that nesting there would be making it far too simple. They wanted a challange.
I found nests in the tool shed, inbetween tools and nails. I found a nest in the fire wood shed, behind piles of logs. I found a nest in the back of the meat bird barn, where the laying hens weren’t even really supposed to go. Behind the bakery, underneath a chair. Next to a big plastic excercise ball in the horse barn. Behind the feed bags and hay bales in the stall where horse food was kept. Even just under the roof of one of Lori’s quirky sheds, in a decorative basket sitting on the very narrow shelf which the roof was built on.
At first, I just picked the eggs. But then, Lori told me that if a hen finds her nest competely emptied, she will think it’s been robbed (which is completely true) and find another place to build a nest. To avoid this, one should either put a golf ball in the nest, which resembles an egg enough to decieve a hen, or just leave some of her own eggs in the nest.
Since the golf balls were scarce, I came up with a system. I would take old eggs from a nest that I’ve just found, mark them with the date, and redistribute them into the nests I knew were active laying places for the hens. No one wanted to do anything with those eggs anyway, since they might have been in the hidden nest for weeks and maybe even laid on and then left (resulting in it containg a half-developed, dead chick). Win-win. If a hen found a nest with many eggs in it, she would become all excited, think it was a good laying place and start laying eggs there herself. And I would know how to separate between the new eggs and the old.
It became a highlight of my days at the farm, going on the egg round, trying to find new nests and the excitement when an old nest with new-old marked eggs had managed to fool a hen into start using the nest again. Ah, maybe I would make a decent chicken farmer after all.
The largest and smallest find of one day’s eggs.
Me in all my egg-picking gear: egg basket, gloves (to protect from the beaks of vicious hens that don’t want to give up their eggs), and the egg marker.
Katja Malmborg 