Too Many Chickens!

(Broadcast 10/25/2013)

Raising chickens has been full of milestones. There’s the excitement of the day I brought them home, the relief of finishing the coop (and the worry of their first night sleeping in it), and the thrill of the first egg. Not all milestones are happy ones, though. There was my first sick chicken, which now looks more like it should be counted as my first chicken to have a stroke. There was my first run in with the horrors of vent gleet, and as a result, my first time standing in the yard blow drying a chicken. I suppose if you think about it enough, anything can be a milestone. I happen to like thinking about it.

When the chickens first started laying eggs, it was December, and you’re probably aware of the fact that December has pretty short days. The amount of light chickens get has a direct influence on how many eggs they lay. Or that’s what I was led to believe. As soon as they all started laying, it was half a dozen eggs a day for a good long time, darkness be damned. We weren’t prepared for such an ovoid onslaught, but it was cool to be finally getting eggs, and nice to see the chickens all pitching in. The fact that they were really sticking it to the darkness tickled me as well. I like the underdog, or perhaps in this case, the underchicken.

Underchicken, of Saturday morning cartoon fame.

As time went on, the six-eggs-a-day rule seemed to be getting more relaxed. If a chicken isn’t feeling well, they won’t lay, and it’s even pretty normal to not lay an egg every day. Sometimes, the eggs would be there, but would be one of those creepy “rubber eggs” I’ve talked about. There are a lot of factors involved in egg production, and it’s unrealistic to think they’d operate at maximum capacity forever, or even for very long.

Summer came around, and some days we’d get three eggs, some days more. Some days they’d lay them in the nesting buckets, sometimes next to them, and in the last few weeks they’d taken to laying them on the far side of the roost, which is very difficult for me to reach. I know when I’m being screwed with, but everyone likes sticking it to the Man, and I suppose I’m the Man in this scenario. I put a plastic easter egg in one of the nesting buckets, and they eventually got the hint. And the number of eggs we got continued to fluctuate. The vent gleet episode took one chicken out of production for a while, so I knew we wouldn’t be hitting six then. The only one I can reliably even keep a tally on is Boss Chicken, since she’s in her own coop (or rabbit hutch, really) due to her handicap. She seems to be easing into an every other day routine, but again, not always. There’s fluctuation, but always eggs somewhere.

I keep a journal of how many eggs each day.

So the other day when I went to check the eggs and Boss Chicken didn’t have one, I figured it was one of her days off. Then I opened the coop, and there were none in the buckets. I felt around in the shavings, since they sometimes like to bury them, but still nothing. So then I climbed into the coop to check the far side of the roost. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. It appeared everyone had taken the day off. It was close to Columbus Day weekend, so maybe they felt it was a state chicken holiday or something. The only thing I do know is that the only egg I got that day was a big goose egg.

Listen to the goose.

I was initially a little worried that maybe their egg laying days were behind them, but they’re only a little over a year old, not even a year and half. They’ve got more time. I think the erraticness of their laying schedules was bound to align eventually, and there we were. The next day, we got more eggs. Next summer I may need to start thinking about what’s going to happen to our egg supply, but we should be good through the winter. That’s not to say I’m not going to start obsessively hoarding the eggs, but you might as well hoard them while you know they’re still coming, right? Right?

(Broadcast 8/23/2013)

One of the big perks of having chickens is obviously the eggs. You learn right away how different eggs from your own chickens are compared to eggs from the supermarket. They taste way better, the yolks are much brighter, the shells seem tougher, and you can even leave them out unrefrigerated if you want to. I want to, just to seem like a daredevil to the uninitiated. It’s not like they sit out for very long, anyway. If I don’t eat them, I find some way to use them as currency, so my supply stays fresh.

Green eggs, no ham

So what do you do then when you start to get eggs that are a little, well, weird? I’ve had ones before that have been kind of pale and flimsy. What are egg shells made out of? Calcium. So how do you think you might strengthen a weak eggshell? Add more calcium to the chickens’ diet. I now leave out calcium chips for my chickens every day. We do still get the occasional oddball brittle egg, but the supplements seem to have drastically lowered the occurrence.

Try not to take the wrong one.

There is, however, another sort of weird egg that is possibly the proverbial “bad egg.” You know those water balloon wiggly things you can buy in stores that the whole purpose of them is that they’re difficult to hold? These eggs feel like that. They have the coloration of an egg, but no shell. The egg lining seems to be what holds them together. I probably don’t need to tell you that this is super freaky. The first time it happened to one of my chickens, I was very confused, and that confusion continues to this day. The rubber eggs seem to come at odd times, because often when I find them, they’re in the bedding under the roost. So it’s like a chicken is asleep, and the egg sneaks out before it’s ready for prime time. Wake up chicken! An egg is escaping! They also will sometimes appear in the nesting boxes, but are usually broken at that point, since this is not the sort of egg that can hold up to being sat on.

An unfinished egg makes its escape.

When you report a rubber egg to the internet, the first question you get in response is whether or not the chicken is young and new to laying. When this first happened, yes, my chickens were pretty young and probably still working the kinks out of the production system. But they’re over a year old now, so I think they should have figured it out. The next suggestion is that it’s a calcium issue. But I give them oyster shells every day, so you’d think they’d be good there too, but these eggs do still happen. The third issue could be that something is internally wrong with the chicken, which could be very bad. The problem for me here is that I have no way to know which chicken is laying these, and if it’s the same one, or if they do this on a rotating basis. I almost never catch them in the act of laying eggs, normal or otherwise. The only thing I’m somewhat sure of is that it’s one of the Mandrell Sisters, due to the color of the egg, which is slightly different than a Barred Rock egg. Even then, this egg is an anomaly, so I don’t know that I can judge an egg by its color here. It seems like a situation where I can really only sit and wait for some other symptom to reveal itself to know if it’s something else. The odd rubber egg is not necessarily anything to worry about. Full time rubber egg production is more of a problem.

Not that kind of rubber egg.

Researching this issue led me to the discovery of an article about something called a “cock’s egg.” Every so often a hen will lay an egg that is much smaller than usual. It got the name “cock’s egg” because people back in the day thought a rooster must have laid it because it was so small and strange. So then you ask yourself, why would a rooster lay an egg? And if you were an old timey farmer person, the answer would obviously be because The Devil made him do it, because that was their answer for everything. Now, I’m not a man of the cloth, so I’m not entirely sure of what The Devil does or does not get up to, but really, The Devil? This is your vehicle of self-expression? “Spreading plague is a real drag sometimes, so maybe I’ll just go make that rooster lay a kind of small egg.” The classic cock’s egg is more or less normal, aside from the size, but any abnormal egg can be considered a cock’s egg, so The Devil’s been in my coop too, apparently. Now I know he’s really got time on his hands. Look, Devil, I appreciate a good practical joke now and then, but you really need to step up your game. I don’t want to go overboard on calcium-filled treats just to find out I’m being punked by the Old Deluder. Either fully delude me, or lay off the chickens. Don’t make me call a chicken exorcist, when I know deep down everyone lays a weird egg once in a while.

El Diablo Pollo

An earlier post with some video of one of my rubber eggs. 

 The article about “cock eggs,” sometimes known as “fart eggs.”

(Broadcast 6/28/2013)

This week’s heat wave has passed, but it’s not even July yet. I’m sure there will be more heat to come, so I thought I’d share some ideas with you about how to keep your chickens cool in the summertime. Like many other living things, chickens don’t like extreme heat. What I have found comforting in my attempts to keep my chickens safe in both the cold and the heat is that lots of places have hotter summers and colder winters than where I live, and people manage to keep their chickens alive through it. That’s not an excuse to slack, but it does keep me from completely freaking out with worry. I need that from time to time.

I was told to take one of these.

The big thing you obviously need to do is make sure the chickens have fresh water at all times during the heat. This is actually something you should be doing anyway, so it’s an easy step. I’m away at work all day, so I fill up the water first thing in the morning when I let them out. In the summer, I just fill up the water container with the hose, and then usually manage to spill it all over myself. Newly awake, I then try again, and usually do better on the second attempt. I also like to put some apple cider vinegar in the water. It’s good for the chickens, and it also helps to keep crud from growing inside there. When it gets warm, that’s a thing that likes to happen. You should still clean it out every once in a while, though. Vinegar is an amazing thing, but it can only do so much. Sorry vinegar, but it’s true.

*sad trombone sound*

Frozen vegetables are another item people like to give their birds in the heat. I’ve read about people putting frozen broccoli in a suet feeder and letting them peck at it all day. That’s akin to another popular one, which is to freeze a cabbage and hang it where they can peck at it. I just toss the frozen stuff in the run, and let them go at it. I like to keep it casual. You don’t have to freeze the stuff, either. Even refrigerated watermelon will do the trick. Is there anyone who doesn’t like watermelon? I haven’t met them, and frankly, I don’t want to. This is one reason I like chickens. They’re on the watermelon tip.

Chickens love “the green whale of summer.” (That’s a Pablo Neruda reference. Go look it up.)

Since I’m not around a lot of the day to keep presenting the chickens with various cooling off items, it’s important that they have a lot of shade. In my general luck with building the coop, I picked a good spot. They get nice morning sun, but by afternoon, they get shaded by some trees. They also have space under the coop where they can go if they need shade at any time. That seems to be their favorite spot. I often find them just sitting there in the dirt. This freaked me out at first, but now that I know they haven’t all lost the use of their legs, I’m o.k. with it. They hang out in the dirt and also take dust baths there. I had considered hosing down the run before I left for the day, but since they use dust baths to cool off, I didn’t want to take that away from them.

Where will they bathe?

Technology can also play a big role in the cooling of chickens. Some people just hook up box fans near their coops and let them rip. Ours is too far from electricity to pull this off. I’d have to run an extension cord, and that brings issues of its own, not the least of which is what to do if one of the thunderstorms that tends to accompany heat waves hits. Now I’ve got wet electricity all over the yard. If I had power out there, I’d give it a try, but for now, maybe not unless I’m home. Fans are totally the low end of the spectrum here too. I’ve read about people investing in “misters,” and they’re not talking about the little spritz bottles. They’re talking about devices like the ones supermarkets use to keep their produce damp. I guess it’s like running under the sprinkler for chickens. It’s neat, but expensive, and there’s a saying about wet hens that makes me think twice about this. When I see the cost involved, I only have to think once.

This image is not based in reality.

What always appeals to me about keeping chickens is the wide array of ingenuity that you see when you’re looking for a solution to a problem. Keeping chickens cool in the heat is no exception. You can keep it low tech like me, or go all out, if money is no object. My feelings usually veer towards thinking that the more complicated something is, the more headaches it can potentially cause. I will do my best to keep them safe and happy with the more rudimentary end of the heat busting spectrum. I guess you can call me a paleo-chicken guy. But don’t, or I’ll hit you over the head with my caveman club.

(Broadcast 2/21/2013)

I have three Buff Orpingtons that to me are almost identical. So identical that rather than give them individual names, I chose to give them a group name, which is The Mandrell Sisters. I suppose I could have given them individual names within that name, such as Barbara, Louise, and Lurlene, just like the actual Mandrell Sisters, but aside from not being able to know which one was which, there’s also the issue of which one was going to be Lurlene. Lurlene is not a name given lightly. At least not by me to a chicken.

It’s a magical moment when this name is assigned.

I pay pretty close attention, but I’ve never been able to get a handle on them visually or personality-wise. They’re all roughly the same size, and pretty much the exact same temperament. My take on Buff Orpingtons is that they are pretty mellow, all around nice chickens. My Barred Rocks have more variation in personality, from the vaguely malicious boss type, to the afraid of everything type. The Orpingtons are sort of the everyman of chickens. This is fine. They’re the bedrock of our flock. I really just wish I could tell them apart. Partly because I feel like I’m slighting them, but also because they keep going broody on me, and I’m curious to know if it’s the same one, or some sort of rotation.

How else do you know whose turn it is?

There have been times when I could tell at least one of them apart from the others. When they were still living in the brooder, one of them had managed to get some, er, “fertilizer” on her back. She didn’t seem too concerned about cleaning it off, and didn’t like it when I tried to. I figured if she was o.k. with it, then it was probably better to leave it than to stress her out by trying to rub it off. While it lasted on there, I referred to her as a form of “Poopy Mandrell,” that I can’t say on the radio. So let’s just pretend I called her Poopy Mandrell. The poop didn’t take too long to come off on its own, and so she disappeared back into the crowd of three.

You have to be subtle when pointing this out.

Shortly after moving them out to the coop, I stuck my head in to say goodnight, and saw one Mandrell Sister pecking at another one’s back. This had apparently been going on for a while, as there was blood all over the place. I reached in and broke it up, and then went inside to figure out what to do. I looked up anything to do with pecking, and it’s kind of hard to know why this happened, but the gist of the fix seemed to be to put something called Blu-Kote on it. It would dye the feathers blue, but if the chickens kept pecking, they’d get a taste of Blu-Kote, and that would be the end of it. We didn’t have any on hand, so I grabbed some trusty Bag Balm, and put it on the wound to at least keep it from getting infected until I had the chance to get to the feed store. When I did get to the feed store, they told me Bag Balm would work fine too, so I lucked out. For about a month or two afterwards, the one who had been pecked had a stain on her feathers from where the Bag Balm was, so she stood out. It too eventually went away, and she eased back into anonymity. I still don’t know why she got pecked, though. Incidentally, I didn’t kill the chicken who did the pecking, and it hasn’t happened again. I’m sure someone told me to kill the culprit, but as has been my experience, I found it was a one time thing, and lives were saved.

The balm squad

The Bag Balm stain got me to thinking about other ways to mark them. The obvious indelible option would be to write their names on their back in magic marker. It would be pretty funny to see a chicken with “Lurlene” written on her back in giant letters. It would even be funny to see one with “Poopy” written down her back, at least to me. However, getting a chicken to hold still long enough to write legibly on her is not a task I want to attempt. Plus, the joke might wear off after a while. It’s kind of like a regrettable tattoo. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I have a dumb-looking chicken. So I don’t think I’ll try this.

Not how you do it.

You can actually buy a device that will put a colored band on their legs for identification. The problem here is that they aren’t cheap, and I only have three chickens I want to distinguish. That seems like a big investment for something that’s not all that big a deal. I would like to know if it’s the same one getting broody, and I’d feel a lot better about myself if I could tell them apart, but I don’t feel so bad that I’m going to blow a lot of money on it. I can probably just get some zip ties or something if it finally wears me down. But I’m only going to do that once I know in my heart of hearts that I’ve got a Lurlene in there.

(Broadcast 6/14/2013)

My wife was commenting the other day about how even though where we live is pretty far from a city, some of our city neighborhoods were actually quieter than where we live now. There are a lot of trucks that pass by on a nearby road, as well as frequent commuter rail and freight train horns. As the summer months approach, let’s not forget about motorcycles. And while we’re speaking of things on two wheels, we also seem to have wound up in a place where large groups of middle aged men put on silly spandex outfits and ride bikes en masse. The bikes themselves are quiet, but the chatter of the riders can make a din, and some of the outfits are quite loud. The good news is that very little of this wakes us up at night.

Who need alarm clocks?

The bad news is that there is something that wakes me up consistently on weekend mornings. Now that the sun is coming up early, it means the chickens are waking up earlier. They don’t have any curtains, so with the first light, they wake up and wait patiently for their master to let them loose into the run. Did I say wait patiently? I meant they begin to make constipated squawking noises at high volume until someone lets them loose. That someone is me. On weekdays, this isn’t a big deal. I get up disgustingly early during the week in order to make the train, and so I am up before the chickens get restless. But it’s exactly because I get up so early during the week that I want to be able to sleep in a little on weekends. Well, chicken culture doesn’t seem to have calendars, so they don’t know about the weekend. I suppose that it has to do with them working from home. Their job is never done! And they’re dedicated workers, so they make a stink when they can’t get out there and chicken.

Here’s the scene: day breaks, the sun comes up, the chickens start complaining. Why is it such a big deal? Well, it seems to have to do with a flaw in my coop design. I have managed to lay things out so the large window in the coop points towards the window over our heads in the bedroom. So with the nice weather when the windows are open comes a relatively direct line of squawk from the coop to the bedroom. I’ve tried using earplugs, but chickens seem engineered to produce frequencies that cut right through those things. If I’m lucky, I get to sleep in until 5:30. I let them out, and they’re happy.

I said, “Who needs alarm clocks?”

The next problem arises when they get too happy. I’m not 100% sure what triggers it, but more and more often these days, at least one chicken will go completely berzerk and sound her barbaric yawp over the rooftops. Or more accurately, sound her barbaric bawk over the cooptop. The bawks are loud, frequent, and repetitive, but also joyous, so this is actually kind of fun. A new development is that one will start and the others will join in. So all six chickens are bawking in unison. The first time this happened I was certain something was threatening them, but when I got to the coop, there they were, all sitting on the roosts, squawk squawk squawking like it was perfectly normal. I took out my camera to get it on video, and they immediately fell silent. I have tried to document this on multiple occasions, even sneaking up on them with the camera, but they can sense when it’s out, and they clam up. I tried to explain to them that people often watch funny animal videos on the internet, but they’re not having it. These chickens value their privacy.

Private chicken.

Sure, they’re noisy, but it could be a lot worse. There’s a farm down the road that has a bunch of roosters, and they don’t just crow when the sun comes up. They crow if the sun is out, or even if it’s overcast. There’s a housing development that runs along the side of the farm, and I suspect those people have some regrets about moving in, since they weren’t there first. We’re lucky to not have anyone living in the house next to us, so for now, I’m the only one bothered by our chatty ladies. If someone should move in, I’m sure you’ll be hearing about what happens. Unless my lawyer has advised me not to talk about it.

Here’s a video of an egg from one of my chickens a while back. I’ve gotten a few of these. My guess is that it has something to do with not getting enough calcium, though I do give them oyster shell chips as a supplement.

Rubbery egg! from Erik P. Kraft on Vimeo.

I came across this article the other day, that reminded me I had taken this video. Turns out it could be the work of The Devil! I suppose I should have called this post The Incredible Cock Egg! to be more in line with the folklore behind this.

(Broadcast 6/7/2013)

We got our chickens the first week of June in 2012. They were a week old, so I did some math and figured out they were born the last week of May 2012. Last week was the last week of May 2013, and I said to my wife, “Hey, it’s the chickens’ birthday.” She didn’t feel like having a party. The chickens probably didn’t either, since I don’t think chicken culture has the concept of parties. I, however, have the concept of thinking about things too much, and so I decided to look back at the past year, and see if I have learned anything.

Someone say “party?”

The big thing I think I learned was that you should not get the chickens until you have the coop. I spent a lot of last summer building the coop, as the chickens got ever larger in their brooder. If you do decide to build your own coop, I hope you have a plan, and some knowledge of how to use tools and/or how to build things. I didn’t really have those things. I pulled it off, but it got pretty hairy towards the end. The chickens were more than ready to go outside by the time we got them outside, and were almost out of space in their indoor pen (even after one space upgrade). I might have some idea of how to build stuff now, but I also probably aged myself a few extra years due to stress and forgetting to put on sunscreen while out working on this project. I will tell you to not get the chickens until you get the coop, but many people will not listen. I heard this rule, and I didn’t listen either. I think maybe it’s a rite of passage. I am now a man, and can take my place in chicken society.

They say a coop is never really finished.

If you’re new to the internet, you might not realize that people have a lot of opinions online. They do. I’m kind of amazed at how quickly people have gone from hiding behind screen names to using their real names and Facebook profiles to post mindblowingly vicious things online. However, I also read the comments on news sites, which I know I need to stop doing. It’s like staring at a car wreck full of kittens. (I totally apologize for that image. I may be turning into one of these people myself). People also have strong opinions about how to handle chickens. When we first got the chickens, I stumbled on a rant by a farmer about people naming their chickens and considering them pets. “Chickens drop dead all the time for no reason!” he said. Goldfish drop dead all the time for no reason, too, but those are considered acceptable pets. I think what he was trying to get at was that getting chickens isn’t the same as getting a dog. They have specific needs, and you have to commit a lot of time to them, and it’s not always as fun as throwing a ball, or letting them stick their head out the car window on a drive (though I don’t think you’re supposed to let dogs do that either). But as a farmer, I think the idea of chickens as pets was so alien to him he started to lose it. Or maybe building his coop wasn’t going so well. It’s hardly the worst chicken opinion I’ve come across. Often the first answer to a “my chicken is doing this, what should I do?” question is “kill it.” Euthanasia is something you have to keep in mind in many cases, but not always. Getting information from the internet should be like going to the doctor. Don’t be afraid to get a second opinion. There are plenty of them out there, and it is the internet, so many of them may actually be wrong.

Anonymous internet chicken expert.

The last thing I take away from my first year of this chicken business is that this has been far more enjoyable than I had any reason to expect it to be. Someone I know recently emailed me about having spent some time around chickens, and how he found it very meditative. I think that’s a good way to put it. In small numbers anyway, I find them to be very relaxing. Being in a factory chicken facility is another story. Chickens are also hilarious. One day one of mine found a worm in the dirt, and half of it was hanging out of her beak. Another chicken saw this, and wanted in. She lunged after it, and the first chicken spun in circles as she choked the worm down, with the other one in hot pursuit trying to eat it out of her beak. Double chicken spiral! Sure, there is work, but you also get entertainment. And eggs. Don’t forget the eggs.

Life enricher/guru.

Someone recently dismissed my first year of efforts as no big deal, since all the bad stuff happens in the second year or beyond. Nothing is worth doing if you look at things that way. I’m prepared to deal with tragedy if I have to, but I’m not going to let the fear of it stop me from enjoying the parts of this that aren’t tragic. I think there are still more good things to experience. In the past year, I’ve killed more hard drives than chickens, and I’m supposed to be a computer guy. Hard drives aren’t as charming as chickens, anyway. And you know what? Without chickens, I wouldn’t be able to come onto Garden Guys each week and share with you what a complete ding-dong I am. That’s something we all benefit from.

(Broadcast 5/31/13)

I’ve talked a bit before about how I’ve fed my chickens their own eggs. You can scramble them up, and the chickens go nuts for it. It’s a nice way to get them nutrition and cut down on the ever growing pile of eggs on the counter. The key part is that you scramble them. If the chickens make the connection that the eggs they lay in the coop contain food, then you may have a problem on your hands. I have had an episode or two with this sort of egg eater, and I’m trying to work it out.

Artist’s rendition of crime scene

The first incident happened when I went to clean the coop. The chickens like to watch me do this for some reason. I assume it’s that they feel superiority over me because I am touching their poop. You know what chickens? Everyone feels superior to me, so you’re not special. Anyway, once I’ve cleared out the smelly stuff and put in new bedding, I usually toss some treats in there so they scratch around in the shavings and mix up any poop that’s still in there. Their excitement is probably due to the expectation of treats. I’m sure it’s not that they enjoy my sparkling conversation.

Hey, Housekeeping’s here!

One day, when I opened the back door to get cleaning, there was an egg in the shavings, and a chicken in the coop. The chicken ran over to the egg, pecked it, it broke, and she began to chow down on the goodies within. I grabbed the broken egg as fast as I could and tossed it in the compost, but I was a little alarmed. “Why would she do that right in front of me?” I thought. I posted on a messageboard what had happened, and within five minutes the first “you have to kill that bird” response came in. I seem to get these a lot. I don’t think I’d have any chickens left if I listened to them all. I understand that if this is your livelihood, you don’t want a chicken eating the profits. But I’m an experimenter, and I wanted to figure out why this happened. This was just the first time, and while maybe this was the start of a bad habit, maybe it wasn’t. I wanted to see if it happened again. I began to suspect that maybe the excitement over treats had something to do with it. Maybe the chicken saw the egg, thought it was a treat, and acted accordingly. I posed this to the forum, but no one had any input on it. “Kill it,” they said again.

A clue that stood out to me was that the egg in question was one of the pale, flimsy ones that sometimes appear. I’m not sure which one of them is doing it, but someone lays very thin shelled eggs now and again. Maybe every couple of weeks. I give them calcium, but sometimes this still happens. I thought that maybe the chicken happened to peck at the egg just to see what was up, and it was thin, so it broke, and “oh hey candy!” I decided to not bring this up with the “kill that chicken” set, but this was the theory I went with.

Weird egg on left.

Over the course of the next several months, I found two more eggs that had been cracked open. Neither had been entirely eaten. Both were pale, thin eggs. I felt my theories were being borne out, but at the same time, I was a little worried that they might move on to eating the other eggs after a while. There is the chance that one egg eater will teach the others the skill, and then you’ve got trouble. I looked up how to handle this end of it, and chose my method.

Chickens apparently don’t like mustard. If you blow an egg out of the shell, and then fill the shell with mustard, Lady Eats-Eggs-A-Lot will come along, try to eat the egg, get a mouthful of mustard, and that’s the end of that. The problem was that since this was only happening with one type of egg – the pale, weird variety – I wanted to use that type of egg to do this. I actually had to take back an egg I had given my parents in order to get the right kind. They don’t happen that often. I went to fill it up with spicy brown mustard, but we had two bottles that weren’t that full, and didn’t help much. So I supplemented that with yellow mustard, which we had a lot of, because apparently no one likes yellow mustard. Then, for a tiny bit of perverse irony, I put a shot of rooster sauce in there, even though people say chickens can’t taste hot sauce. Just let me have my fun, people.

Gravity was no help.

I taped up both ends of the egg to slow leakage, and put it in the coop. Not even duct tape would stick that well to the egg, but I did my best. The chicken I suspect of being the egg eater, a Mandrell Sister, was the first on the scene. She approached the egg, and rolled it back towards herself a couple of times. Chickens sometimes scoot the eggs along the floor with their chins. I guess when you don’t have hands you have to make do. She then began to tap it a little, as if to test the strength. Then she found the tape, pulled it off, and “oh hey candy!” She got a mouthful of mustard, did a little head twitch that seemed to indicate that she didn’t like it, but went back for more anyway. By now others had shown up, and a couple gave it a taste. I figured I’d let them all in on the idea that egg eating is wrong. They all had more than one serving, even though they twitched after every bite. I decided I might be making it worse by letting them continue to feast, so I took the egg away, and hoped they got the message.

This totally looks like a normal egg.

The big thing I took away from this was that the first chicken seemed to be doing some sort of quality control on the egg. She tapped it a bunch, and with these pale eggs, the shell is pretty weak. I’m now thinking that the eggs that have gotten eaten, or at least cracked open, can’t withstand a gentle peck, and that’s why they broke. I don’t know if they do this to reject bad eggs, or if they just like pecking the eggs. I don’t think the eating is habitual, at least not yet. As I keep saying, those eggs are few and far between, and sometimes they’re tougher than others. I gave the chickens the mustard test, so we’ll see how it goes. We got a weird egg on Tuesday, but it was in one piece. Meanwhile, no necks will be wrung over this. I just want to understand, man.

I’m running low on the oyster shell chunks I bought a while back, so I thought I’d give making my own calcium supplements from our eggs a shot. I’m happy to report that if you do it right, there isn’t much of a smell. I’m less happy to report that I didn’t do it right on my first attempt, and there most definitely was a smell, and that smell was not good. Our oven is still out of commission, so I thought I’d try baking the eggshells in the toaster oven. Whenever I adapt a recipe to the toaster oven, I usually knock a bunch of time off, since the smaller oven heats up way faster. The eggshell baking recipe I chose said to bake them at 350 for 20 minutes. I figured I’d be safe and set the timer for 10 minutes. That seemed like way more than enough leeway. Until I heard the timer bell go off in the other room, and one second later got hit with a waft of smoking eggshells. They smelled a little like burnt egg, but with a real metallic tang to it. I, of course, had also tried this experiment on the coldest day of the week. I opened the window for a little while, but it was just too cold to air things out. I had also been home sick that week, and was in no mood to deal with any of this. The whole house reeked, even though they weren’t all that burnt. The stench was impervious to both scented candles and incense. Only time was able to bring down the hideous aroma.

Eggs waiting to be eggshells waiting to be supplements.

I am not one to take defeat lightly, so once I was feeling better, I decided to set out to find the best way of baking shells for my current kitchen set up. I sheepishly returned to the toaster oven for round two. This time I decided to just try toasting them, rather than a full bake, and I set the timer to “medium” to really be safe. The toaster tends to undertoast, so this seemed o.k. I also did this while I was doing other things in the kitchen, so I would notice if things started to go south again. The medium setting did the trick. They were a little bit browned (this is a toaster, after all), but not burnt, and the shells were nice and brittle, so mashing them up was easy. So the toaster oven wasn’t totally evil, I just needed to be careful with the magic it contained.

Like everything involving chickens, there are about 100 different opinions on how to do anything, and preparing eggshells as calcium supplements is no different. I decided to try microwaving next, since that seemed like it would be super convenient, if it worked. I tried microwaving a couple shells on high for 20 seconds. There was a bit of a crackling sound, which made me a little nervous until I remembered I wasn’t nuking a light bulb. (Don’t ask me about how I know what a light bulb in the microwave sounds like.) I think the crackle was just moisture being cooked out. There was a bit of an eggy smell, but nothing too toxic. The quickness of the process couldn’t be beat, but the shells themselves didn’t seem as easy to mash as they had with the toaster. Which is better: quickness, or a mild degree of difference in the ease of crushing? Tough call.

Various stages of the mashing process.

Things that stink up your house come in threes, so I decided to try boiling the shells also. I put them in a pot of water and let it come to a boil, and then took them off the heat. The good news is that there was no smell, save for the general smell our burners give off (which is yet another reason we need to replace the stove). The bad news is that there was a really creepy foam on top of the water, which I didn’t like at all. Also, the whole thing boiled over when I was taking notes. Yes, I was taking notes. This is science we’re dealing with here. The other bad news is that you have to let them dry afterward, which seemed to take a lot longer than I thought it should, and I think that’s just one step too many.

It’s supposedly important to cook the eggshells in some way in order for the chickens to be able to absorb the calcium. Raw ones will not do, though some people claim they just let them air dry over time and then grind them up. That seems like an invitation to fruit flies and mice. It also seems time consuming (though mostly involving waiting). And then on top of it all, it may not even provide nutrients to the chickens, depending on who you ask.

I suppose if you want to go the DIY supplement route, experiment and see what works best for you. We’re not all chained to our toaster oven. (And we actually just bought a new stove, so I may have to break it in with another test.) Of course, the internet being the internet, there are lots of arguments to be read about whether or not feeding the eggshells back to the chickens creates chickens that eat their own eggs fresh from the cloaca. I suppose this leaves me some room for yet more experimentation.

Or you can just give them yogurt.