Eggs?

Only eight eggs yesterday.  A few weeks ago we were struggling to keep up with a dozen a day, and then suddenly it dropped off.

This happened last summer.   Late one day we discovered that the coop door had accidentally closed.  We open it right up and laughed at the line up of hens at the nesting boxes.  The next day egg production suddenly dropped.

Two days later we found a dead hen in the coop.  The book said that sometimes hens die of being egg-bound.  The hen doesn't lay her egg and it gets stuck.  We think that's what happened, but because we weren't sure, we treated the hen like she died of disease and carefully wrapped the body in several layers of plastic before whisking it off to the garbage.

Afterward, we made sure the flock had lots of good quality feed and slowly the production came back up.  It took weeks, but it did come back.

Now it's dropped again.  We have one sick chicken, although she might be injured and not sick.  But then, how would we know?!  How do you tell a sick chicken?!   They don't have noses that run.  How could you tell if they were pale?  I don't even know how to check for a chicken fever, and I don't think I'm interested in learning. 

Then something else occurred to us.  It's still warm, but we are on the other side of the equinox.  The books say that chickens lay best with 14+ hour days.  By the end of December when we'll have only nine hours of daylight, production will drop by more than half.  In commercial egg farms they take care of that by using electric lights, but we're going to stay with the sun.  Today we have eleven-and-a-half hours.  Maybe our flock is on the normal decline from shorter days.  We haven't gone a whole year with chickens so we are still learning how their normal cycles work.

I hope it's just normal seasonal decline.

The sick chicken is doing the same.  My nine-year-old checks on her several times a day.  This morning she went out to check on her again.  When she came in I asked how Soody was doing.  "The same," she said confidently.  It's been a week with no change.  Then I asked, "do you think she is suffering?"  My sweet little girl dropped her head, leaned against me and and said, "yes."