The biggest double-yolk egg I’ve ever seen! Just as I suspected.

Big Red has gotten broody and decided she wants to hatch some eggs. She has taken over the lower nest box in the coop, and has eight eggs under her! She is very serious about it all. I only know there are eight eggs because she gets off the nest once a day to go out and poo and have a drink and a snack, then comes right back and sits on them again. If I disturb her she fluffs up and hisses!

I have been told I need to mark the eggs with a pencil so I can tell if anyone slips an extra egg in there while she’s off the nest, because if the eggs don’t all hatch at once she’ll abandon the ones that don’t hatch once she has some chicks. Also after ten days I’m supposed to candle the eggs and get rid of the ones that don’t have a developing chick in them. She has to sit on them for 21 days, and if some of the eggs are bad, they will go really bad and explode and leak nasty goop on the other eggs which might kill the chicks.

Of course my friend Martha has new chicks every year because her hens sneak off and lay their eggs somewhere, hatch them, and come marching back with a whole flock of chicks following them. So obviously it’s not that difficult!

Her sister, Little Red, also got broody, but she kept moving from nestbox to nestbox. I had been taking the eggs away from her, but once it seemed like she was serious I gave her six eggs to sit on – I just slipped them under her skirts. At first she was hissing and fluffing up at me, but once she saw I was giving her eggs she started happily clucking and rolling them into position under her! I don’t know if she was letting the other hens bully her or what, but a couple days later she had moved to another box and let her eggs cool off. Unfortunately it won’t work if she only sits on the eggs for a day then switches to another box, once she starts sitting the eggs she can’t let them cool off for more than about a half hour when she gets off to take a break once a day. So I put her in this small coop. The nestbox is the dog crate, and the caged area has bedding and food and water. She is currently setting on golf balls in the crate, and if she continues to sit on them for another day I’ll remove the golf balls and replace them with some eggs. Chickens can’t tell golf balls from eggs. Close enough for them!

I took the eggs she had sat on for a couple days and cracked one open. You could see there was a little bit of development starting, just the ring on the yolk where you can tell the yolk is fertile had expanded a bit, but otherwise it just looked like a normal egg.

I am saving up the eggs I collect from the other hens by setting them in a carton on the shelf there in the shed next to the coop. Once I have six or eight I’ll slip them under Little Red in her new private nest box and see how she does sitting on them.

Big Bird thinks I am interfering with his hens too much! Back off! And get away from my coop!

One of my hens laid this HUGE egg! Here it is next to a regular large egg. Someone laid one almost that big a couple weeks ago and it was a double yolk egg. A friend said she was talking to folks about eggs and they didn’t believe there were double yolk eggs, because the machinery in modern factories kicks them out so it’s rare for people to see them anymore. But when I was a kid it was a big deal to be lucky enough to get a double yolk egg for breakfast!

Look at the size of this thing!

When I built my chicken coop I expected to have maybe five chickens. I didn’t know chickens were like potato chips, you can’t have just one – or three, or five, or..well, you get the picture. So they were a bit crowded in there, and I ended up having to leave the top open so there was room for everyone to roost. Plus, when the snows came I had to open the coop to the rest of the shed to give them a little room to move around until the ice storm passed. So I knew I needed to expand to keep my 8 girls and one roo happy.

I spent quite a bit of time saving up bits and pieces, and planning it out. Finally I dug in today, planning to finish it in a day, because the chickens needed a place to sleep by evening.

I started out by pulling the old coop apart, carefully unscrewing everything to save the pieces, and shovelling out all the old cedar chips and poo.

I cleared out the shed on that end and laid down a 9 x 6 roll of floor vinyl, then screwed it to the floor with wood strips on each end.

The flock had to check out all the old pieces of their home which were now on the lawn!

I started rebuilding the nest boxes, expanding to four instead of just two – not that two hadn’t been enough, just that now there was room for four. I kept a piece of the ladder for the hens to use to climb up there.

I added another roost on the wall across from the nest boxes, but I’m not happy with it, I think I’ll build another one tomorrow to replace it. I also hung the feeder, which will keep them from pooping on top of it. Then built the wall between the shed and the coop and finished it with chicken wire. There’s a door on the end of the wall by the nest boxes to clip in and collect eggs. I was particularly proud because I reused almost every board out of the old coop, plus a few more scraps I had around. The only thing I had to go buy was the vinyl for the floor.

The chickens moved right in to check it out, and by evening they all seemed to be finding their new spots. Except the ‘wild’ chickens, they were so put out that last I saw they were sleeping in the tree!

So it was a busy day, and by the end I was tired and sore, but satisfied by a job well done. Then a friend sent her son over to take away our remaining hay (I traded it for petsitting later in the year, and she needed it to feed her horses), and our herding teacher came over and took Houdini to his new home guarding her sheep. As I sat on a feed bin in the shed watching the chickens exploring their new coop, warbling and clucking as they checked out the new nest boxes, while the sky outside grew dark, I couldn’t help but feel a tingling sense of peace. I miss the livestock but right now I think two dogs, two cats, and nine chickens is just the right amount of responsibility.