The Hot Hens of Summer

In 1966 (the year I was born), a musical group called "The Lovin' Spoonful" released a song called Summer in the City that had the following lyrics:

Hot town, summer in the city

Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty

Been down, isn't it a pity

Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people looking half dead

Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

Do you remember that?  Well, it's not just summer in the city.  It is summer in the country, too, and the chickens are walking in the pasture, hotter than a match head.

Healthy (but hot) hens on green grass

Benjamin was visiting his MoMo Kay and Papa today, so I had egg duty.  I grabbed Benjamin's wire egg basket and made the rounds collecting eggs to the chicken tractor, the hen house, the goat barn, the hidden nest underneath the old freezer, and the nesting boxes in the barn.  It was there that I encountered an Aracauna hen we call "the barn owl" because she likes to hang out in the barn.  She will fly up into the rafters to roost if we don't evict her.

Generally the hens finish up laying around noon or shortly thereafter, but this old gal was on the nest at 6pm.  She didn't much appreciate me being there.

Leave me alone!

I quickly caught her and used a pair of scissors to trim all the feathers off of her right wing.  She'll not be flying up in the barn rafters for quite a while now. Aracaunas lay either blue or green eggs and sure enough, there was a sky blue egg in the nesting box right next to a wooden egg that I put in the boxes for rat snakes to eat.  Obviously, the snake won't be able to digest a solid wooden egg and it will kill the snake.  When you find the dead snake, you can cut it open and retrieve the wooden egg to use again.We call these snakes chicken snakes, but I think the correct name is rat snakes. They love to eat eggs.  They're harmless but they grow to be exceedingly large and they scare you by their size.  

I was talking to a gentleman at church Sunday morning who told me that he caught a rat snake in his hen house.  The snake had numerous bulges.  Some bulges shrunk when hit with a shovel.  These were chicken eggs that broke in the snake's belly.  Some didn't shrink when hit.  Those were the wooden eggs.  After scaring his wife with the big snake, he got his wooden egg back!

Blue egg from the Aracauna alongside a wooden egg

We always see a significant reduction in the hens' egg production numbers in the peak period of summer.  The hens are just hot and uncomfortable.  They are doing what they can to stay cool and the heat takes a toll on their egg laying.  In March, April, and May, we were picking up between 3 and 5 dozen every day.  We don't get that amount in summer, though.  Look at that miserable little basket of eggs.  11 of them to be exact.

Not even a dozen

I did find a hidden nest in the goat barn that contained 6 dozen eggs.  Every once in a while we discover hidden nests like this where sneaky hens find creative new places to lay their eggs. Sometimes the eggs are old and rotten and I'll carefully compost them in the garden.  If they aren't rotten, but just questionable, I'll feed them to the dogs.  Other times, like today, I feel like these eggs were laid recently and will still be good.

Discovering a hidden nest

Since the summertime egg productivity has dropped off, we value each egg and don't want to waste them.  We keep these questionable eggs separate and we'll crack them one at a time in a separate bowl.  If the yolk is intact and looks good, we'll eat it.  If we have any reason to doubt one of them, the dogs take care of them.

Usually, if we get overcast days or rain, the chickens feel comfortable again and will reward us by laying more eggs.  We look forward to that.