A Little Benign Neglect

Our chickens were all kinds of out of sorts this spring, pecking each other bare and refusing to lay. Though we tried several interventions to get them to stop, we gave up entirely a couple weeks ago and decided to leave them to their own devices.

And we were rewarded:

Here are Abigail, Rachel, and Martha, all squeezed into the nesting boxes trying to lay at the same time. We are suddenly back up to four eggs a day, though we don’t get them all unless we are very quick:

That dark brown egg is one of Lizzy’s though it’s been pecked apart. I presume she does this herself, because she is (still) stupid and terrible. The other chickens seem to think so, too — just the other day I saw Louisa Catherine oh-so-casually reach over and pull a big beakful of fluff out of Lizzy’s behind and then spit it out with contempt. 

Even with the loss of an egg every other day or so, we’re definitely back where we should always be at this time of year as far as production is concerned. We still have some pecking issues, but we also have eggs, so they can be as mean to each other as they want at this point. 

I still am not really sure what the issue was, but it seems to have resolved itself, and now we suddenly have over two dozen eggs to eat up. 

Quiche tonight!