One thing about spending the day at home is that we can keep an occasional eye on the chickens. Our flock of three can be a constant source of amusement, amazement and distraction. They’ve all been going through some changes over the last few months, too. The annual moult started in earnest at the tail-end of the summer and although all our laying ladies have been going through it to some degree, Barbara and Margot have definitely suffered the most.
Both of them have lost handfuls (or wingfuls) of feathers – at times it looked like there’d been a chicken feather pillow fight in the coop – but they both seem to be over the worst of it now. Which is just as well. With plummeting temperatures, now is not the time to go featherless and bald. They need to grow them back fast, and although their heads are at last recovering (and they don’t look like old grey-haired ladies any more due to the grey colour of the feather shafts), they still have a way to go until they’re back to the glossy birds we remember.
One thing the moulting does is to affect the egg laying. The tally has been dropping steadily since September and the onset of autumn, but November saw a record low, with just 37 eggs collected from the bottom of the garden (compared to 91 in August). That’s barely enough for us, let alone parents and neighbours who watch them while we’re away. Once the annual moult has finished, normal service should be resumed, though. At the moment Gerry (above) is the hardest worker of the threesome and while she’s lost a few of her ginger-flecked feathers, she seems to be oblivious to the fact that it’s happening.
Our plans for getting more birds has fallen by the wayside somewhat and with Christmas almost upon us, it may not happen in the next couple of weeks either. We’re probably going to focus our efforts on more hybrid hens as opposed to rehoming battery birds, but even if we got them now, there’d still be no more eggs; they don’t start laying until at least 24 weeks old, arriving with new owners seven weeks before that. And, with six birds in total, we could have a problem. We may need even more vegetable scraps, as our three love them so much. It might also be a little harder to keep any on them all…
Tags: Chicken-keeping, Journal