Finally, The Girls and Rocky are going to bed before us! It's kind of embarrassing when your chickens want to stay up later than you do. However, as the days get shorter, and cooler ( high of 7 Celsius today!!!), The Girls and Rocky are sleeping in a little later and going to bed a little earlier. They have also started to molt - a nice array of feathers decorates the coop every morning. And, egg production is down - way down. Now, commercial poultry people augment the light their chickens get to keep up production. They 'fool' the chickens into thinking it's still summer. We're letting ours go the natural way - although once it gets really cold we will put in a heat lamp, which will increase production somewhat. We've also noticed that the Leghorns (the white chickens) are laying smaller and smaller eggs. Now, we've always gotten the occasional tiny egg; we figured it was from Funky Butt, a chicken with a crooked tail. But all of a sudden, we've gotten two tiny eggs a day for a couple of days. We hope - and our loyal customers hope - that it's not the wave of the future!
The less light is not a happy thing for me as it seems like it just got longer. I am thinking this will be one of the years with fewest daylight hours. On the plus side we have never had this much green for so long. Chickens are a pleasure to watch. We ordered chickens from Murray MccMurray in the early 80s and had them shipped by mail. It worked great and they all arrived alive. In the batch were 25 exotics but we were too new at the chicken thing and they did not do well. Best chicken adventure we have had was buying 12 or 15 Light Sussex one year olds at the auction. They laid from fall and all through winter at 1 under the number of chickens and hardly ate any food. Thanks for the post.
ReplyDeleteI wish we had that 'hardly ate any food' type!!
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