October 25, 2010: Falling Off the Deep End and Hawkeye Lays her First Egg

October 25, 2010

Monday, 11:14am

Catching up on the last few days – in a second....

I just watched Goldie lay her egg, standing, neck arched forward and out it plopped.  A few minutes later, Ellie, who couldn’t wait any longer and had gone into the box across from Goldie, stood up and walked back into Goldie’s box which was now empty.  Within minutes, she laid her egg too.   I’m sure most of my friends think I have fallen off the deep end with this chicken thing, but it has changed me forever.  Once you raise a chicken from a day old, watch it grow and feather out and develop its own distinct personality and then begin laying (I suppose the equivalent of a human reaching “puberty”) you are changed.  You see that it is not necessarily easy or pain free for the chickens to lay eggs, you watch them strain and arch their neck and dig into the floor with their claws and you begin to equate it to a human going into labor DAILY.  Once you feel an egg in your hand that is still warm and know that it came from a chicken’s body...things change.  Eggs are no longer something that comes off a shelf, nicely enclosed in a carton in the refrigerator section of the grocery store.  Eggs become....real.  Instead of taking them for granted, I now have a keen appreciation for where they really come from and the labor that goes into making them, both my own and the birds.  It reconnects you with the earth, makes you thankful for your food again and is its own kind of special blessing – a reckoning of who we were and who we now are, how far we’ve come and perhaps some things we’ve lost. 

That said, I was right...Hawkeye was next to lay.  Now I know that I was not “hustled” and that she truly is an Easter-Egger, for she laid a long, narrow, pointy, gorgeous matte green egg on Friday.  The second one was much larger and rounder.  As Hawkeye started laying, Raven decided to stop.  Not sure if it was a scare from the hawk swoop or if she is just resting.  She has appeared to be semi-broody, sitting on the nest but hopping off a lot as well. 

So now next will be Farrah, although she doesn’t really seem very interested yet.  Last of course will be Chanel.  They have now laid over 90 eggs.  I imagine shortly they will slow down as Winter approaches.  I went to show the Haithcock’s the new green egg and they commented on how hard the egg shells were from the eggs I have given them.  It seems to make more of an impression on people than the color of the yolks.