A Fan of the Chickens

I caught up with my good friend Sunny in St Louis the other day.  She was visiting her daughter and our two daughters got together and arranged for a group meal.  I brought along my other daughter and her husband and we had a great time catching up and introducing Sunny, the microbiologist, to my son-in-law, a student of microbiology.

When Sunny was not conversing with Heath in what sounded like a foreign language but was only scientific terminology, she and I talked about our families, empty nesting, quilting and she mentioned reading the blog.  Apparently her favorite topic on the blog is the chickens so I know feel compelled to write another update. 

The chickens are not up there in my good graces at the moment.  Out of twelve chickens we are collecting one egg a day and since it is always the same color I am beginning to think it is from the same chicken.  However, I am still hopeful that as the amount of sunlight per day get longer, more chickens will start laying eggs.

In their defense, it is possible the chickens were traumatized by a storm a week or so back.  During the storm, a dead tree fell right through one of the two outside chicken pens.  At least, I assume it happened at night during the storm.   I cannot swear to that as that was the one day that week that Mike and I did not check in on the chickens.  So for a minimum of a twenty four hour period our chickens were vulnerable to outside predators.

The tree branch knocked down the netting that we put across the top of the chicken pen.  This keeps hawks from flying in and carrying off chickens and it keeps chickens from flying out.  Fortunately none of these things happened as Mike did a roll call and all chickens were present and accounted for.  

The branch also knocked down the electric fence that we have placed around the perimeter of the entire chicken area.  It's suppose to protect the chickens from being disturbed by our dogs and more importantly from any wildlife like raccoons who like to kill chickens.  I guess the threat of the fence is a pretty good deterrent as it obviously was not working for a while there but no harm came to our poultry.  

Mike immediately shut off the electric fence, removed the branch, locked the chickens out of the damaged coop and went shopping.  He came back with replacement parts for the pen and more netting to cover the top.  Within just a few hours, Mike had everything back to normal and the chickens had the full run of the coop again.  

Now if we could only get some more eggs.