Saturday 15th July 2017
An egg a day!!
These eggs were laid over five days: the rows represent the days and the columns the individual birds (as accurately as we think)! It’s all quite fascinating and from it we can clearly see that at the moment we have a total of twelve birds actually laying and that in this specific five-day period, two of them laid every day (the two blue eggs layers).
It takes 26 hours for one egg to be laid. In theory this means that if a hen lays at 8am one morning, she will lay at 10am the next, 12noon the day after that and so on until the point where it gets too late in the day for her to lay and she skips a day.
In practice it is not always quite like this. We have birds who miss more than one day at times, others who will lay every day for over a week before having a break, some who only lay a couple of times a week. The gaps in the columns show some of these examples: our green egg layer (column one) missed three full days before laying but now might lay every day for a few days.
Just because a bird CAN lay an egg every 26 hours does not mean they will. The age of the bird is a determining factor and generally, the older the bird the less eggs it lays over a year. Change can be a factor, things such as moving the nestboxes or, as in our case this week, moving the straw bales some of them have been laying on (we had to as we needed to use them!!!). Having broody hens around can put other hens off as well, although this may be more because broody hens will ‘hog’ the nest boxes. Some breeds naturally lay less because they have been bred more for meat and so their laying abilities have been ‘bred’ out of them.
If you remove the eggs each day, in theory you encourage more egg laying because a chicken’s ‘natural’ behaviour is such that they will carry on laying until they have a clutch (10-15 eggs depending on the breed and the bird) and then stop!!
At this moment in time (!!) we don’t want to hatch any more chicks so we are removing eggs on a twice daily basis. Our last batch (nine Indian Game eggs ) under Hedgerow Broody are due to hatch on the 26th of this month.
In practice it is not always quite like this. We have birds who miss more than one day at times, others who will lay every day for over a week before having a break, some who only lay a couple of times a week. The gaps in the columns show some of these examples: our green egg layer (column one) missed three full days before laying but now might lay every day for a few days.
Just because a bird CAN lay an egg every 26 hours does not mean they will. The age of the bird is a determining factor and generally, the older the bird the less eggs it lays over a year. Change can be a factor, things such as moving the nestboxes or, as in our case this week, moving the straw bales some of them have been laying on (we had to as we needed to use them!!!). Having broody hens around can put other hens off as well, although this may be more because broody hens will ‘hog’ the nest boxes. Some breeds naturally lay less because they have been bred more for meat and so their laying abilities have been ‘bred’ out of them.
If you remove the eggs each day, in theory you encourage more egg laying because a chicken’s ‘natural’ behaviour is such that they will carry on laying until they have a clutch (10-15 eggs depending on the breed and the bird) and then stop!!
At this moment in time (!!) we don’t want to hatch any more chicks so we are removing eggs on a twice daily basis. Our last batch (nine Indian Game eggs ) under Hedgerow Broody are due to hatch on the 26th of this month.