more randomness

I love my doggie. She is a big poo poo head and can be quite a crank sometimes, but she loves people and doesn't mind little kids. She loves to go out with me early in the morning to work on the sprinklers and check on the garden. I love this picture of her enjoying the morning sun. It looks like her idea of a perfect dog moment.

So, I have another chicken issue. This is momma #1. She has decided to roll the eggs out of the boxes and sit on them. Every day for about a week I was crawling in their little house to collect all of the eggs she'd roll out of the boxes. She'd get so mad and peck at me something terrible. I finally got tired of that and hoped that if I put all of her eggs in a box she'd stop stealing the eggs and would be happy with her 4 or 5 eggs I gave her.

Oops! Picture out of order. What do you do when your cat catches a baby mouse? You put it in a jar of course! Yuck! It was squeeking and climbing the jar. Chris finally got tired of it and made them put it down. We went over why they couldn't bring a wild mouse into the house and put it in a cage. We aren't going to think about what the cat did with it after they let it go.

Back to the chickens. The stealing didn't stop. Now she has an accomplice and they weren't happy until they had about 10 eggs under them. We had to mark them so we'd know which ones were the sitting eggs and which ones they were laying. It's a bit of a trick getting them out from under the testy birds. Lots of pecking, lots of puffing up. They looked at the eggs a bit strangely when we put the blue stripe around them but finally gave in and are happily sitting on their clutch of eggs. Unfortunately they have slowed down production from the other birds a little as well. Where I was getting 9-10 eggs a day now I'm only getting 6. The good news is a couple of my newest babies are now laying peewees so they'll help pick up the slack. Hopefully the kids will have new babies in 2 or 3 more weeks to take care of. Summer makes for easier hatching since I don't have to keep them warm. Then it will be time to do in a few of the flock. We've not done any culling yet since we're only approaching year one with our birds. Egg production is influenced by the age of the bird so I'm putting Chris in charge of doing some of the oldest birds in this Fall. That's the theory anyway. I'm not sure I can go through with it. I've grown quite attached to them. Little buggers.