Think Like a Chicken

Aliens are beaming my chickens’ eggs into space.

That’s the only explanation I had at the time.

This was when I was a new chicken owner and I was playing everything by ear. Or, if you prefer, I was winging it...

Not funny, I know.

They had gone through their first season of eggs an d it was awesome. Eggs for everyone! And after one of them stopped (or so I assumed) laying around mid-October, I thought, well it’s probably normal; maybe she just decided on a change of career. Who am I to stop a chicken from achieving her dreams (even if those dreams are of being a chicken who doesn’t lay eggs)?

Several weeks later, however, I’m down from five or six eggs per day to three.

Hm. Union strike?

My girls have a middle-sized dirt area where their nests, coop, water, and food is. Typically they lay in the nests, where they're supposed to. Unless Sessy is inside, and in that case she lays her egg on the couch.

But the majority of their day is spent in the back acre: waist-high grasses, with thick brush and copses of cedar and oak trees scattered about. A regular chicken paradise I would imagine.

It seemed, however, that some of them were deciding to forgo their nests for more liberating conditions.

Good for them; for me, not so much.

When the girls were still teenagers and before they had backyard privileges, Sessy (yes, the very same the couch-chicken) was escaping the dirt area every morning. I would come out to find her pacing the fence, trying to get back in.

What could she be doing out there?

Obviously not foraging – at least not for long; and yet every morning, out she went.

And so, naturally I thought to myself, “if I were a chicken, where would I go?”

Ten feet away from the fence stands my tool shed, raised off the ground on a cinderblock foundation.

Right there. That’s where I’d be.
It's quiet, dark and cozy.

And sure enough, down on my hands and knees peering under the shed I saw a cute little circular dirt berm and close to eight light brown eggs. (I also found a very mature ants’ nest²² and spent the rest of the afternoon alternating between ice on the bites and anti-histamine cream.)

Fast-forward to late fall and my alien theory.

I decided to (try to) be rational and had an idea to go on an Easter egg hunt. I mean, an acre really isn’t that big of an area. Think of a football field – from goal line to goal line, that is essentially one acre.

Not so bad, right?

I spent over an hour scouring the ground, pushing aside brush, waddling on my haunches like a duck to get a chicken’s-eye-view of the really overgrown areas, knowing that any minute I’d come across a pile of bright, multi-colored eggs standing out incongruously against the dark green foliage. And even if an animal was raiding the makeshift nest each night – and there are plenty of egg-eaters around – I would at least find broken shells and an obviously assembled nest area.

Again, I thought to myself, “if I were a chicken, where would I go?”

All the obvious spots were empty: under the shed, in especially thick patches of tall grass, underneath piles of heavy brush and scattered sticks (which is also, incidentally, where I would go if I were a rattlesnake wanting some privacy).

Every time I peeked down, I was sure there would be a nest; and even in places where I thought it would be ridiculous to lay an egg, I checked just in case.

There was nothing.

Finally, I had to admit defeat. I poked my head into the nesting area (four comfy hay-strewn boxes) and saw one girl staring back at me in annoyance. The other nests were empty, both of chickens and of eggs.

For a while, the chickens had the ball; I was perplexed.

I certainly wasn't going to revoke their yard privileges (and now I forever think of prisoners and chickens playing ball together surrounded by a 20 foot barbed wire fence), and I had to admit it probably is every chicken’s dream to be wild and free, roaming the land and laying eggs where she will. Shawshank Redemption 2: Hens on the Lam.

However...

As it turns out, I have some very image-conscious hens in my midst.

That winter was their first molting season. Starting around 18 months of age, each winter a chicken will lose a large amount of her feathers and stop laying eggs. Once spring rolls around again, all is back to normal.

What tricked me was none of my chickens were losing feathers. They all looked great actually. One of them seemed a little patchy, but she was the last layer in the group.

The others look perfectly normal.

In fact, I had to give Poof a second haircut that season because her feathers grew in so fast and she kept getting lost. So on the inside, their bodies were in hibernation; on the outside, they were still all sass and fluff. Lord only knows who they were trying to keep up their looks for - my little rooster was long gone.

Proof that even in the animal kingdom, females tend to dress up not for the men,
but for each other.

²²Side note: it came to my attention several years back that there are places in the United States where ants are small and innocuous. Let me just clear this up right now. In the south, the ants are large, wicked, murderous creatures that enjoy nothing more than to cause pain and suffering.

Thank you for reading!
If you enjoyed this, please upvote, resteem, and follow
for more of my country life oddities.

Sources:

First Chicken
Breakfast Chicken
Ernie
Soccer Player
Chicken Run
Glam Chicken