Hidden Eggs

There has been a certain paucity of eggs from the hen coop over the past week. I had been putting this down to the age of my hens. They are now almost three years old.

However egg numbers had not actually decreased. One of my avian friends had decided to lay her eggs in the open air yards distant from the coop. I came upon her surreptitious clutch quite by chance deep in a herbaceous border. I removed five of the six eggs in the hope that the errant hen would continue to lay her eggs in what is no longer her secret lair. This she has done for the last two days. It would seem that she has not appreciated that she has been rumbled. Hens aren't good at counting.

Egging It

It is now twenty seven months since I took delivery of eight hybrid point of lay hens. They cost me six pounds a bird. Not a large investment in livestock. A month later they went into egg production. Since then I have had a continuous supply of eggs albeit that this current winter has seen a very definite decline in numbers. 

Their first moult didn't seem to impact on their productivity but this year the decline has been pretty much as per the manuals. Perhaps it's the colder and wetter weather conditions.

The fact that I have lost twenty five percent of my flock has of course also had an impact on the number of eggs available for my breakfast table. When I say lost I don't mean that I have mislaid them a la Lady Bracknell. No unfortunately I have to report that two of the trusty layers have entered avian nirvana. One of the dearly departed just keeled over for no apparent reason. The other however may have suffered the administrations of a reddish brown mammal or perhaps a peregrine falcon. In any event the last I saw of her was a clump of downy feathers.

Yesterday I collected three eggs from the coop including number four thousand eight hundred so the average per hen has now surpassed six hundred. Excluding the capital cost of the coop I calculate that the eggs have cost just under seven pence each to produce.