Carol's Chickens

The bedtime routine seems to be ever changing. The way in which it is changing is that the little girls are getting closer and closer to the big girls. They have gone from the coop roof to the little chair and last night to the high perch, right along side the big girls.

Is this the new routine?

All five girls on the high perch

As I close in Amber hops down

This is the first time I have seen the little girls on the high perch. As I got close to them they hopped down and resumed their position on my little chair. From there I lifted them both down to the coop and then lifted the big girls down to join them. They seem to get closer to the big girls every day!

last night before bedtime I scooped up a couple of buckets of damp wood chip that the girls had scratched out of their run. I dumped it back in the run and watched them scratch through it. They found a few worms and little bugs and I love the way that they are so together now.

Five girls scratching together

They love scratching through the wood chip

The photos are not great because of the constant movement but they show that my little flock truly are one flock now!

Yesterday Bluebell laid her egg in the little coop. This morning she laid in the little coop again. I wondered if Bluebell preferred the little coop because it has more headroom than the nest box. Bluebell is our biggest girl and I know hens have to stand at the moment of expelling their eggs so wondered if this meant the little coop suited her better.

Later in the day I checked the little coop again and found Pepper’s, Honey’s and Amber’s eggs all together. This now seems to have become the preferred nest box, it seems that it may be a prestigious thing. Pepper’s egg was cold but Honey’s and Amber’s were still warm so Pepper was the first to lay. Dotty laid later in the afternoon in the usual nest box. She is the only one not to have shown any interest in the little coop.

This is our very first five egg day. Both the little girls eggs had normal shells and they didn’t look unwell before laying them so perhaps have got the hang of it at last.

Today’s eggs

Bluebell’s egg is on the left, next is Dotty’s egg, then Pepper’s then Honey’s and Amber’s egg on the right. Although Pepper and Dotty are both the same breed I can tell their eggs apart because Dotty’s eggs are slightly darker in colour than Pepper’s. At the moment Amber’s eggs are slightly smaller than Honey’s but when they catch up their eggs will be impossible to tell apart unless the shade of them changes.

For a while now the big girls have been roosting on the high perch above the storage cabinet at dusk, until I go and lift them down and put them in the coop. For the last week the little girls have taken to roosting on my little chair which hangs just below the top of the run and opposite the high perch. They obviously want to roost as near to the big girls as they can get.

The little girls on my chair

The big girls on the high perch

The little girls turn to face me

They look so sweet on here although I wouldn’t think it’s that comfortable as the chair is smooth and slopes down slightly.

I pick up the nearest little girl and put her in while the other one flies down. I then lift down the three big girls and put them in. Then I lay my torch on the ground to light the coop door and the second banty follows it and goes in and I close the door. I have been doing this every evening recently and it is a quick and easy way to get them all in.

The other thing that has changed in their bedtime routine is that the little girls now sleep on the perch with the big girls or on the floor in front of the perch instead of in the nest box. They have definitely grown in confidence and want to be around the big girls.

The other change to routine yesterday was that Bluebell laid her egg in the little coop instead of the nest box. I have no idea why she chose to do this. They are funny girls.

I have also identified the feather that I found below the bird feeder.

Spotty feather

I looked at owl feathers and other birds of prey and there were several birds with spotted feathers but when I put “greater spotted woodpecker feather” into google I got a photo of a feather that matched mine exactly. It had the same number of spots in the same place and was identical in every way to my feather. As we have greater spotted woodpeckers visiting the feeders in our garden this makes sense. Another mystery solved!

In my last post I showed part of the garden so decided to follow up with the rest of the garden. I also wanted to update on my quest to identify the mystery plant.

I had a hunch that it may be an orchid so put wild orchid into the internet search. It didn’t throw up my plant so I added spotted leaves to the search. This gave me common spotted orchid. The leaves exactly match the leaves on my plant. The flower hasn’t yet opened so I won’t be able to match the flower until it opens properly but from the leaves I am certain this is what the plant is. I can only think it got to our garden from a bird dropping the seed. I will follow up with a photo when it opens.

The veg plot in front of the chicken enclosure

From the veg plot looking down towards the patio

Looking up the garden

Looking up towards the chicken enclosure

Hosta’s

I will be straight back to chickens after this but felt this completes my previous post.

I don’t usually write on subjects outside my chickens but this time I am making an exception. I have a plant which self seeded in one of our patio pots last year. It looked unusual and a bit special so I transplanted it to a small pot of it’s own. It is very slow growing and this year has produced a single flower bud which is taking a very long time to open.

It has narrow leaves with black spots on and the bud looks as if it will be white. There is nothing in my garden that looks anything like it and it’s not like any plant that I have seen before. I wonder if anyone knows what this is?

Strange plant

Unknown plant

While on the subject of unknown items, I found this feather under our bird feeder today. I am very familiar with the wide range of wild birds we have visiting our feeders but I have no idea what this spotty feather belongs to.

Spotty feather

unknown feather

While I am off topic I thought I would show a snapshot of the garden.

The big poppies have been really good this year

A big splash of mauve

The mystery plant a few weeks later

The mystery plant is taking ages to flower. It’s been like this for weeks now.

Pale pink bud

Here it is another week later and I can now see that the bud isn’t white but is pale pink. This is so incredibly slow to flower that I have run out of patience and will update at another time if it ever fully opens.

Our rambling rose – Paul’s Himalayan Musk

This is the view going up our path.

It also rambles over our cabin

This is the view from the other side. The cabin is our kitchen where we run our catering business from.

It tumbles over the arches

It is a mass of soft pink with plenty of buds still to open

The other rambling rose is just starting to open

The honeysuckle beneath the rose is also in flower. I tie the rose into the arches but this year will have to cut it back a bit once it has flowered. We are now having to duck under the arches but I don’t want to spoil it while it’s flowering.

The garden is full and lush after the recent slightly warmer temperatures and intermittent rain. We put these roses in when we moved here six years ago and they have grown an incredible amount in that time. This entire garden was laid to lawn when we moved in and we gradually took out the lawn and replaced it with cottage garden plants. It is still evolving but we are very pleased with the results.

Honey laid her egg in the little coop yesterday. Dotty laid this morning (in the nest box) and Bluebell has taken a day off after her new record of laying for thirty eight days in a row!

This afternoon Amber and Pepper both wanted to use the nest box at the same time. This is where the problem arose last time causing me to install the little coop as a second nest box. Pepper reluctantly tolerates sharing the nest box with the big girls but absolutely will not share with the little girls and last time pecked Honey’s comb until it bled.

Amber is the smallest girl and also very feisty. She took possession of the nest box first. Pepper was not happy. She shouted and shouted, louder than I have ever heard her shout before. Her face went redder than I have ever seen it before. She was livid! She strutted around, kept looking in the nest box and kept shouting.

Then to my surprise she went into the little coop and settled down.

Pepper in the little coop

We wanted to go out at this point but I didn’t want to leave with Pepper shouting or with the possibility of Amber getting her comb pecked. Now that Amber was in the nest box and Pepper was quietly installed in the little coop, I felt that I could safely leave them to it.

We returned a couple of hours later and I went to check on them. To my surprise neither girl had laid an egg. Once again they had put themselves through all that upset when they weren’t even ready. Amber still doesn’t seem to have got the hang of when she needs to lay and Pepper often takes a long time to lay and does have false alarms from time to time.

In the end though, it doesn’t matter which girl uses which coop as long as they can manage it without any bloodshed!

This morning I noticed Honey going in the little coop a couple of times. After lunch I went to check for eggs and was surprised to find Honey’s egg in the little coop and Bluebell’s egg in the nest box. This is really good news as it means if Honey is happy to lay her eggs in the little coop she will be safe from getting pecked by the big girls.

She had laid her previous egg two days earlier and today she showed no sign of looking unwell. Maybe the limestone flour has sorted out her problem and it looks like she is starting to lay normally now.

It will be interesting to see where Amber lays her next egg.

After Pepper and Honey both wanted to be in the nest box at the same time, the day before yesterday, neither of them laid the following day. Yesterday evening before bedtime Honey looked unwell again. I knew this meant she was going to lay another egg soon. She had some meal worms and some water then sat behind the bush until bedtime. I just don’t understand why egg laying makes her feel so bad as her eggs have normal shells. She hadn’t laid an egg for seven days.

This morning Honey seemed back to normal but still no egg. I went out on my deliveries and when I returned I found three eggs in the nest box.

Today’s eggs

Pepper’s egg is on the left, Bluebell’s in the middle and Honey’s egg on the right. I don’t know if the girls went in one at a time or shared the nest box but there was no sign of blood anywhere and all the girls seem to be getting along okay. No one seems interested in the other coop but I will keep it in there for now.

It’s such a shame that Honey seems so off colour every time she is about to lay an egg. I keep hoping it will get better with practice. I just don’t know why it effects her like this.

This morning Amber laid her seventh egg and it was her second normal shelled egg. I have been giving the girls limestone flour and their egg shells ground to a powder in their morning mash and it seems to have worked. The shell on Ambers egg feels hard and she laid it in the nest box. Well done Amber!

Shortly after Bluebell laid her egg. This afternoon I checked on the girls and Pepper and Honey were missing so I knew they must be in the nest box together. I grabbed my camera thinking I might get a sweet photo of them together.

I was shocked when I lifted the lid of the nest box and saw that Honeys comb was bleeding.

Pepper and Honey want to lay at the same time and the red spots on Honey’s comb are fresh blood

I was even more shocked to see Pepper hold Honey down and peck her already bleeding comb. Honey would run out then return to the nest box and Pepper would hold her down and peck her comb again. I felt sickened. Poor Honey’s instinct to lay in the nest box was so strong that she kept returning even though she kept getting pecked. Pepper was equally determined that she wasn’t having her in the nest box.

I had to act quickly and I put the plastic divider on the nest box to separate it from the coop. I then picked up Pepper and put her in the nest box and closed the lid. When Honey returned to the coop I closed the coop door. This would make it dark in there and I hoped that would allow her to lay her egg on the coop floor.

I felt really cruel shutting them both in their separate compartments but I couldn’t bare to let them go on trying to both sit in the nest box while poor Honey was repeatedly having her already bleeding comb pecked.

I checked them frequently and at one point I let Pepper out of the nest box. She hadn’t yet laid (Pepper takes the longest of all the girls to lay her eggs), and she was really distressed when she found the coop door shut and couldn’t get back in. I picked her up again and returned her to the nest box.

I opened the side of the coop to check on Honey and she had made a nest on the coop floor between the perches and the side that opens. She was calmly sitting so I decided to leave her.

I went back a little later and checked on Pepper. She had laid her egg so I let her out and then opened up the coop and removed the divider. Honey came out of the coop without laying an egg. I couldn’t believe she had put herself through all that and wasn’t even ready to lay. She really doesn’t seem to know when she is ready to lay.

Peace was once more restored and Honey bounced back as if it had never happened. This is another problem that we need to try to solve. My husband suggested we put the spare coop back in as a second nest box.

I put it on the patio with the ramp facing the corner between the storage cabinet and the fence. I hope this will keep it dark and make it a suitable place for egg laying. It remains to be seen how long it will take for the girls to find it and if they do, will they want to use it! It’s worth a try though and if a situation like today arises again, I can pick up one of the girls and put them in the second coop instead of adding the divider. Whether they will stay in the coop to lay remains to be seen.

The little coop to become a second nest box

The ramp facing in to the corner

I will close the ramp at the end of each day so that they don’t sleep in there as I would have to be up early to let them out, while the big coop has the automatic door opener. I hope this will solve the problem but it’s a case of waiting to see. Just as things get better  there always seems to be another problem to solve!