{"id":26114,"date":"2018-08-16T16:20:42","date_gmt":"2018-08-16T16:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/?p=26114"},"modified":"2018-08-16T16:20:42","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T16:20:42","slug":"we-have-a-deranged-chicken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/?p=26114","title":{"rendered":"We have a deranged chicken"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are quite sure that Flame is deranged. When I decided to add two more game girls I was influenced by the fact that Toffee and Emerald were gentle, quiet, girls. I thought that was how game girls were and to be honest I hoped to have another Toffee and Emerald.<\/p>\n

Ebony and Flame couldn’t be more different. They are loud and shouty and Flame seems demented. They have blended into the rest of the flock perfectly and the flock get on really well and there is no bullying. You would think that they had always been together. It was our easiest integration and they sit together in harmony.<\/p>\n

It’s just their egg laying habits that are causing mayhem. When Ebony is in the nest box Flame shouts and when Flame is in the nest box Ebony shouts and boy is it loud. They are the loudest girls we have ever had.<\/p>\n

Ebony has adjusted to the high nest box. She goes in and settles and then lays her egg and comes out again just like any normal chicken and just as you would expect.<\/p>\n

Flame is a different matter. She will manically run from the chicken shed to both nest boxes. She digs and digs and throws all the shavings out of all three places. It wouldn’t be so bad if she just did this for a while before she laid her egg but she sometimes does it for an entire day!<\/p>\n

Flame is a prolific layer with her best record, since being with us, being twelve days before taking just one day off so her egg laying antics are quite a pain. Like all girls that lay every day she lays an hour or two later each day as it takes about twenty six hours for a hen to produce and lay an egg.<\/p>\n

Recently she laid her egg at four in the afternoon so I knew that her next egg would be due at about six o’clock. She started her manic behaviour at ten o’clock in the morning. She spent the entire day running from the shed to the nest boxes and throwing all the shavings out.<\/p>\n

In the meantime Ebony needed to lay her egg so she went in the high nest box while Flame was in the shed. This caused Flame to shout her head off when she realised. Eventually Ebony laid her egg and Flame continued for the rest of the day with this behaviour until finally laying her egg in the high nest box at six o’clock as I had predicted. From then on she was calm and normal again.<\/p>\n

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The chicken shed<\/p><\/div>\n

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The patio nest box<\/p><\/div>\n

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The high nest box<\/p><\/div>\n

And there is the manic Flame! I feel like this behaviour must be stressful for Flame\u00a0too and I just don’t know why she is doing this. I can’t work out what she doesn’t like about any of the nest box choices. I have given up putting the shavings back in until the end of the day because it had become a never ending job.<\/p>\n

Some days she is worse than others by which I mean that some days she does it for longer periods of time than other days. I just hope that they take their end of year break soon. I never thought I would find myself hoping they would stop laying.<\/p>\n

I hope that after a winter break she will have forgotten whatever it was that she thought she needed before and will just accept the nest boxes we have. I intend to put the high nest box back in it’s usual position on the patio over winter and I hope in spring the game girls will find the nest boxes and accept them.<\/p>\n

This is a problem that I could never have imagined would arise. I had hoped that over time Flame would settle down but she seems to have got worse with time. I can only hope that things will calm down over winter and that in spring these two will be used to our set up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are quite sure that Flame is deranged. When I decided to add two more game girls I was influenced by the fact that Toffee and Emerald were gentle, quiet, girls. I thought that was how game girls were and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26114"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26114"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26146,"href":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26114\/revisions\/26146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carolschickens.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}