Five Egg Day

Yesterday was an eggciting day!  (Sorry, I just couldn't help using the bad pun...)

We have precisely five chickens and we got eggsactly (i know.  i'm sorry.) five eggs yesterday for the first time ever! 

Five chickens, you ask?  You may have thought we had six, and if you did, you're not wrong.  We started with three full grown chickens last May thanks to some friends in Chinle, and then we got three more young ones last July. 

Yes, 3 + 3 = 6. 

Alas.  Jack got a taste of chicken back in early December.  Somehow one of the pullets (we had dubbed her Little Jive because she was a young replica of our other Australorp), had gotten on the wrong side of the fence within our yard.  That is, she must have flown to Jack's side of the fence.  We had not clipped our pullets' wings because it had not yet been an issue, but those little ladies are definitely more adventurous than our older (perhaps wiser) hens.  Jack sure made some feathers fly.  Miraculously she was not fully down and out, with seemingly minor surface wounds, so amazingly Ryan and Julie tried to nurse her back to health.  (I was in Germany throughout the ordeal.)  The first couple of days it seemed to be working, but alas, we should have had her for dinner from the start.  By the end of the week, Ryan did what had to be done and by then it was too late to eat her in her unhealthy presumably infected state.    RIP, LJ.  

But on a happier note, right before Christmas our two young, now fully grown, Wyandottes laid their first eggs.  They're smaller than the others but beautiful and just as tasty. 

Yesterday morning, we were just debating whether or not Big Jive was still laying, as we hadn't seen the evidence lately.  And given the short days, Dolores and Mulva aren't laying every single day.  And all the eggs are variations on light brown, so we can't always tell exactly who's laying which ones. 

But at the end of the day when Ryan went out to close the chickens in for the night, he found not 1, not 2, but 5 eggs all in one day!  Two small pullet eggs, and one from each of the other three.  Yay! 

this is our very first egg after we got the chickens last may.