The chucks were making quite a racket this morning. I have no idea why. Normally they’re as quiet as anything until you head out with their morning feed and call ‘chickens’ from outside the hut. That gets them all excited, they start to do that funny murmuring thing chickens do, and then leap down the ladder as soon as you open the door.
This morning they were squawking away before I’d even gone out there, from much earlier than normal. And they were loud, too. I could hear them in the house. I don’t know whether they’d had a bad night with the fireworks.
Anyhow, I let them out, cleaned out the litter trays and threw in half of one of the cucumbers we grew this summer but didn’t harvest because it was balloon-like and yellow. Margot and Barbara went for it straight away, but Gerry sniffed it suspiciously, kicked it upside down so the fleshy side was down in the mud and then stalked off into a corner. Strange girl.
Two eggs again, as usual. The huge one we got the other day turned out to be double-yolked. I’d suspected it might be, and I guess on that count we should have boiled it or fried it to maximise its dipping potential, but instead we hard-boiled it for sandwiches and split it between the two of us.
And dad called with some advice. He knows far more about chickens than we do, having grown up on the family farm. I told him about the double day, when we got four eggs instead of our usual two, and explained that it had been straight after the snow.
It wasn’t entirely unlikely, he said. The snow would have reflected the light, and the sky would have been brighter, being full of the white stuff, which would have thrown the chucks somewhat. Probably enough for them to increase production in the same way that lights in battery chicken sheds are used to send the egg laying rate through the roof.
Related posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Beautiful bird in the picture. I wish I could remember the breed.
I wasn’t aware of snow reflecting light. I keep my chickens more as pets and don’t light them.
{ 1 trackback }