Problems in the coop. The chickens are slowly starting to lay again. The trouble is, they’re not doing it in the right place. I don’t know whether it’s the cold that’s upsetting them (their water is still frozen every morning and has to be defrosted with a kettle of hot water), or the dark, shorter days, or whatever, but they have taken to laying on the roosting bars rather than in the nesting box.

We found one egg balancing on the bars yesterday that had got so cold it felt like it might have frozen. We’ll see how that turns out when we crack it open.

This morning, though, we found two, and both had been pecked open. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps they were bored. Maybe they were curious. Perhaps it was an accident.

Whatever the reason, it’s bad news for us. That’s three eggs lost in a week when we’re only getting about one a day anyway. We actually had to buy eggs yesterday, for the first time in ages.

I’m not sure what the solution is. If the hens are pecking the eggs themselves to get at the food inside then there are solutions: you can buy china eggs so that when they peck them they hurt their beaks and soon learn not to peck them any more. I have read elsewhere that you can also fill an empty egg with chilli, which obviously gets up their nose and puts them off (although this strikes me as cruel).

Most worrying, though, is whether these eggs are appearing when the chickens aren’t expecting them and they simply don’t have time to get to the nesting box. They have all had a chalky shell, rather than a smooth one, which suggests to me that there may be some deeper problem to blame.

Related posts:

1. Eggs for September
2. Four eggs in the big freeze
3. September was a record month for eggs