Itty Bitty Brown Egg

It doesn’t seem any accident to me that the roosters were removed from our premises on Tuesday and one of the Wyandottes laid her first egg three days later.  Yes!  A small brown egg showed up in one of the nest boxes yesterday morning!  I just know she was waiting for those annoying boys to be out of her face.  I’m sure her coopmates will follow her example in short order.

The wonder of it all was that she actually used the nest box.  For one thing, hens are known for laying their eggs in peculiar places, especially hens of the free range variety.  Ours have always gone into the coop to lay (though not necessarily in the nest boxes) but I’ve heard about hens that consistently lay under a certain bush or even in the middle of the driveway.  Obviously, our Mrs. Wyandotte is smarter than your average hen.

Before Nyel built the coop, he did quite a bit of research concerning design.  He chose to put the nest boxes above floor level and on the opposite wall from the perch. For starters, I’m not sure how the chickens even know how or where to perch, and it is a total mystery how they know what those nest boxes are for.  But most of them do.

After the raccoons made off with our entire flock of five hens last November, Nyel thoroughly cleaned the coop and repainted the inner walls.  Before our new flock went inside in July, he lined the coop floor with hay but left the nest boxes bare.  “They won’t be laying for a few more months,” he told me.

For several weeks now I’ve been asking when he thought those nest boxes should be lined ‘in preparation’.  “Soon,” he kept telling me.  Wouldn’t you know that Mrs. Wyandotte had to settle for a bare nest box floor on which to deposit her very first egg?  And it cracked!!!   I hope, being a first-time layer as she is, that she doesn’t really know the difference.

Needless to say, there is a soft bed of hay in each nest box now.  We hope that Mrs. W. doesn’t scratch it aside before she lays the next egg.  Hens tend to be very strict in their habits, always laying in the same nest box (we have three) or on the same spot on the coop floor.  I’m hoping this obsessive/compulsive behavior does not extend to the surface material.

As for the egg – it was very small, which is typical of first eggs – and brown, and the crack wasn’t too bad.  Even so, I would have thrown it out fearing salmonella poisoning or some other dread ailment, but Farmer Nyel (in honor of Mrs. W.’s first?) insisted on frying and eating that egg for his breakfast…  Wouldn’t you know?