WE GOT EGGS – And a Doug!

We got our first egg on Sunday August 3rd!

The amount of excited jumping, was very much. I don’t think either of us expected to be so excited, but boy were we. All these months of hard work on our part and growing for the hens and the final product is finally here! Our first layer (who we later determined to be Ceres!) laid her egg on the coop floor just one day shy of 19 weeks old! Great job little lady!

• 

Ironically we were headed out to open up the nesting boxes and happened to look into the coop and saw this little nugget lying on the floor. Not too bad a spot for a lady who had nowhere else to lay. As is common with pullets (aka young hens) eggs are frequently laid in odd places and could contain other “deformities” like:

• Wrong shape – extra long or circular
• Wrong size – “fairy” eggs are extra small, where as sometimes you get a extra-jumbo double egg with a literal egg inside another egg!
• Inconsistent laying – Some ladies will lay eggs daily, others may skip a day or two as their bodies figure out how all this mess works

Needless to say we got to work in a hurry to open those nesting boxes up. For our size coop and the number of ladies we have, we have three built in nesting boxes with an easy to access door (although sometimes I’ll argue it’s too easy and I’ve opened up the door to stare directly into a startled hen’s face [or butt] who has some seriously grumpy noises about being disturbed haha – Pro tip: Always count your chickens before opening up the door!).

For materials you want to use something that’s easy for the birds to move around so they can actually build out a nice comfortable nest to lay in. We selected these nesting pads (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CAVMIK2) from Amazon. The advantages is that they provide a comfortable nesting materials but are attached to a paper backing which prohibits (or at least reduces the likelihood that the hens are going to pull all the materials out of the nesting box and play with it in the coop #chickens). Another advantage is that they’re easy to dispose of (and compostable!) as you can just pick up the paper and pull out the whole mess! They should last us about 1-3 months depending on usage. Currently 5 out of the 8 hens who are now laying use the same nesting box, so that one might be up for replacement early. Turns out hens will develop “favorite” boxes based on some arbitrary hen math. Hopefully they do some recalculations and end up spacing things out a bit, otherwise there will be a pretty good line forming in the morning haha!

Those eggs you see there aren’t real, we bought a number of hard wooden eggs (which we marked with an “X” as they are so easily mistaken for the real thing haha!) to put into the boxes as decoys. This helps in two ways: One it shows the ladies where they should be laying their eggs (and thus far since the boxes have been open, we’ve not had ANY lay outside the nesting boxes!) and two it helps to prevent hens from developing a very hard to break (har-har) happen of eating their own eggs. Hens who peck these eggs are not rewarded by tastiness unlike the real things, and repeated peckings hopefully show eggs are not to be messed with after laying. And again, thus far, our hens have been excellent terrible moms, dropping the egg off in the nesting box and then heading back out to start their day! Lay’em and Ditch’em – exactly what you want in an egg production focused coop!

The first week of egg laying was also the same we we adopted our new dog Doug which was convenient because it allowed a very-very-very-excited-Ellen to check the boxes for more eggs almost hourly instead of just before/after work #superexcite. Also say hi Doug to the nice people!

• 

• 

• 

• 

Doug was originally thought to be around 13-14 years old when we adopted him, but turns out there was a typo on his intake and he’s only 10! Excellent news because he’s an awesome very happy pupper! He’s been with us for about three weeks now and is getting along great with everyone. He has to “suffer” with two tasty joint treats each day and we’re seeing a big improvement in mobility since we started them. He’s up to trying to run after and keep up with Esther (which he does so only via shear increased stride length vs actual speed haha). He was super underweight (about 10 -15 lbs) so he’s had to suffer these past few weeks with getting extra food and snacks. Poor Doug. What a hard life you will lead here.

• 

• 

• 

• 

But yes, the eggs. That’s right. The next big challenge we faced was determining who was actually doing the laying. Hen’s tend to lay around the same time, but that can greatly vary when they’re noobies (pullets) and not sure yet how everything works. The plus side being that they normally take between 20 – 30 minutes to lay so at least we have a good time range to be able to catch them. Enter the Wyze Cam.

Yup, you know us, we’re nerds. So the best, clear, obvious, solution was to install a webcam into our coop and run. We purchased the following items off Amazon:

• Two Wyze Cams
• Two USB cables
• One USB Splitter

The perks to the Wyze cam are many:

• Cheap! $25 per camera is NUTS!
• Free 14 day storage. No stupid video subscriptions. (RING, I’m looking at you)
• Detection based on Sound, Motion or Person.
• Live video OR recorded video
• SD Card allows for continuous recording & continual playback
• Two way Audio (for those critical moments in the day when you need to tell your ladies they’re being awesome!)
• Setup is less than 5 minutes!

Cons:

• No battery. No solar option. Require USB power
• Have a 5 minute cool down between motion/sound recorded events (this is bypassed by using an SD card)
• Video is only 12 seconds long. (also fixed with SD)
• The Infrared lights attract bugs like none other.
• Not waterproof!

The result was exactly what we wanted!

• 

• 

Using these two cameras we can track when someone enters the nesting box and then simply compare who else is out in the coop. Today, September 6th, we’re up to 7 out of 8 ladies laying.

• 

• 

• 

• 

And boy are they beautiful & Tasty! (This is five eggs with two of the being Double Yolkers too!)

•