Sorry for the delays in Egg-A-Day lately but there hasn’t been any egg production other than Pixie’s egg every other day roughly. This is due to the older chickens being in their molting stage still and the younger chickens we believe haven’t started laying, or are very good at hiding them in the forest… Addie thinks they haven’t started yet and I believe there is a massive pile of young chickens eggs somewhere out there 😉
Don’t worry though things will pick up eventually. This is natural this time of year for chickens to go through this cycle. Also with the fewer daylight hours now the chickens will need time to adjust as well to that.
Rest assured that all the chickens are doing well. The coop has been vapor sealed so no cold breezes blowing through. We are installing the reflectix like last year soon. And when it starts getting colder we will use the candle heaters as before.
Just click on the pictures to enlarge them if you wish 🙂
FixedByDoc 
Oh, no… Sounds like the kids could use serious mentoring. Perhaps a stern clucking to by their divine brood mom, Pixie is in order. I hope the kids haven’t decided to rebel by becoming hipster chicks smug in the irony that they’re hens who simply choose not to lay like everybirdy else… Maybe you should give them “participation trophies” to encourage them! 😜
LikeLike
Well tomorrow I am going on an egg hunt and see if i can find a new nest in the woods somewhere. The young ones should be laying by now. the older crew still have some molting time left. Good ole pixie though has been coming through for us 🙂
LikeLike
So, I just watched this video about brown vs white eggs: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=je44qy-_MHY …and now the guy has me wondering. He says chickens with white ear lobes tend to lay white eggs, while those with red lobes tend to lay brown. Ummm… WTH?!? Chickens have ear lobes?!? I shouldn’t be told stuff like this after enjoying a 16oz mug of Irish coffee – mind. freakin’. blown!😵 Has that been your experience? What color lobes is our finely feathered ginger goddess Tandoori sporting? Also, what color lobes do the blue & green egg laying hens have? And, if you say teal Imma come up there & hot wax yer mustache. Hmmmm… On second thought, maybe this one should be handled by our Patron Saint of Poultry & Miscellaneous Critters, Addie – 😇.
LikeLike
This is my third try, Doc’s laptop hates my hands and keeps disappearing my comments because my palm gets within 3 feet of his touch pad below the spacebar….anyway. I’m trying to condense everything here. I’ve heard about the red and brown, white and white thing a couple times. Most recently, I read it a bit more expanded, and if I remember correctly, it’s more of a trend than a rule. It’s not cause and effect, but more that when the people who developed a particular chicken’s breed standard they specified a particular color, and it usually ended up that red lobes were ones which laid brown eggs, etc. I’m not sure how that all played out decision-wise, and I know there are a few exceptions. As for our flock, it gets even more fun, because while Nutters and Oregano (and as I remember correctly, Sam, Paprika, Parsley, Rosemary, and Basil) lay(laid) various intensity of eggs and had obviously red ear lobes, things get weird when I try to describe Bubbles, the Easter Egger 4, and maybe some of last year’s hatching. They have a sort of purple overlaid with blue and powder white colored earlobe which rather reminds me of that ape with the blue-ish muzzle (baboons? mandrills?), and lay various shades of green-blue eggs. Tandoori and her hatch-siblings, as far as I was able to see when I snuck up to the coop just now (and offended a few chickens) are a more fleshy-yellow color, but might have a tad of the baboon overlay on them. Or maybe they don’t have ear lobes, I’m not sure where the “ear lobe” begins, and the patch of non-feathered skin behind the eye ends… or if that’s all the same stuff, it’s just some are really big, and some are nearly not there (like combs and wattles can vary in size and shape too). Most of this year’s girls have small combs and nearly no wattles (I’m happy about that). Pixie seems to have sort of peachy flesh toned earlobes. If you really want to get into mind blowing, the brown color on an egg is sort of “painted” or “washed” on the egg just before it’s laid, the blue color is a metabolic byproduct and actually put into the eggshell as it’s deposited, and the egg shell its white when it’s not got blue or brown added. Green eggs are brown and blue eggs at the same time. Blue is a dominant trait, and I think white is a recessive, or at least submissive. And on top of that, there’s a breed, the Araucana (blue eggs) (not Amaracauna (blue eggs) official breed which I can’t spell correctly right now, but I’m also not talking about “Americanas” which is an expensive word for Easter Egger (blue or green eggs), which has tufts by its earlobes. Only I can’t remember if it’s a recessive or dominant trait, but it’s also lethal when it’s homozygous so if you breed two together you usually end up with ¼ of the eggs not hatching to start with…. Go figure! Anyway it I hope this really long comment has been worth the effort of you reading it 🙂 -Addie
LikeLike