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This past spring, we entered the phase of starting to add animals to our homestead.  Animals besides the dogs and the plethora of wild critters that share our acreage.  Though I am not much of a meat eater, and though as a child I hated eggs, I have developed a liking for a well cooked egg and after seeing too much about how commercial chickens for eggs and meat were kept, decided that this was a good place to start.  Enter the chicks.  Inexperienced and totally enamored with the cute little fuzzy balls of fluff, my chicken addiction took off.  Buying chicks from Tractor Supply proved to not be the best way to go about it.  My original purchase ended up very heavy on the testosterone side.  Realizing that I had too many cockrells (young roosters) and that was not going to work out, we stumbled on an animal swap day at Tractor Supply while going to buy chick feed.  The folks had Buff Orpinton and Olive Egger pullets (young hens) and I left with one of each.   Next up, I contacted a local gal who had 6 Silver Laced Wyandotte pullets she wanted to get rid of that were about the same age as the other chicks and I purchased them from her.  I was scammed, they were all cockrells.  Realizing that most of my flock was going to be culled for meat, I found 2 more Buff Orpington pullets only a couple of weeks younger than the rest of the flock and began to separate the potential eggers from the cockrells who were beginning to strut their stuff and trying to crow.  My flock now looked like a meeting of the U.N., one pullet of this breed, 2 of that,  3 of another.  Then the first Buff Orpington got huge and started crowing, about the same time that I decided that I only want to raise a heritage breed that winters well, so Cogburn got to stay with the girls.

The rest of the guys, well, my son helped put them in freezer camp and I even grew a second flock of 15 more meat birds for him to put in freezer camp with my help.

As the story goes, one by one, the ladies started providing me with beautiful oval orbs of cream, tan and brown, depending on the breed, then one day, there was a green egg.  Yay, the Olive Egger had started to lay.  Only two others gals were still figuring it out.  By mid October, we were getting 6 to 9 eggs each day.  The Olive Egger had some difficulty figuring it out.  She would give us an egg one morning, then one the next evening, then skip one to three days before beginning again, but it was fun to find the Easter Egg in the nest.  She seems to be able to fly better than the others and soon, we would find her on the outside of their run, hovering near the fence, but separated from her flock.  I would lure her back in and sometimes find her out again the same day, sometimes she would stay put for days.  About this same time, her egg production seemed to fall off and I assumed that she was escaping to lay her eggs elsewhere.  I searched the grass around the run, rummaged through the weeds growing in the compost bins, looked through the mint bed, checked for indentations in the straw mulch on the garden, no eggs.  We were preparing to go away for a couple of weeks and a neighbor was going to watch the flock in exchange for eggs, so I secured the pen so that she could not escape.  She only produced a couple of eggs while we were gone and has now gone on strike and hasn’t layed an egg in over two weeks.

They are too young to molt, which throws off egg laying, the days are shorter and cooler, but the other pullets are still laying, there is no illness in the flock and she doesn’t seem to be egg bound and is otherwise healthy.  She is just on strike.  I had hoped to keep this flock through next fall, adding more Buff Orpington pullets in the spring and keeping a couple of Easter Eggers for fun, letting the Buff Orpingtons raise chicks to keep the flock self sustaining and culling the other hens from the flock next fall, but this one girl is free loading and I’m not sure she is going to be allowed to get away with it.