A hunting we will go

Yesterday when I went to the chicken coop, basket in hand to get the egg “haul” of the day, I discovered only one egg! Boo-hoo!

What I believe happened was this. The wily goats have discovered the chicken feed in the coop. And they like it! Mucho! Which is fine, it’s organic, no problem well except that little goaties shouldn’t be eating a lot of grain, and can in fact gorge on it and cause themselves some pretty significant issues. So to avoid that problem, when the goats are out (because we let them out nearly every afternoon for browsing and exercise) I close the outer door to the coop to keep them out of the grain. Apparently yesterday when I did this, most of the gals hadn’t laid their eggs yet. *sigh* So I imagine they found someplace that would “do” and dropped them all there. Arg!

I kinda wandered around and glanced at some of the places the girls like to hang out, but didn’t find anything. Oh well.

We’ve still been getting 5-7 eggs a day from our 8 remaining hens. I have plans to get some chickies to enlarge our flock hopefully sometime in February. I’d like to get them settled into the brooder in the garage and growing well between when our goats kid. I’ve been looking on the My Pet Chicken website and have pretty well decided that I want to get Easter Eggers as my next batch of layers. They are called that, you may wonder, because they lay eggs in a variety of colors, most often blue and green, but also cream and pink even! How fun! With 15 of those we’d have a colorful egg basket for sure! 🙂

As for the goats. I’m getting nervous! We are within a week of Polka’s possible due date! And guess who gets to be midwife? US! Ack!!! It’s weird but I’m more nervous about helping these silly goats have kids than I was having my own… well, sorta. Anyway, I didn’t have to be on the “catching end” with mine. 😉 I’m looking forward to seeing what and how many babies we get! It’ll be fun to have bouncing kids around. What I’m not looking forward to is having to disbud them. 🙁 That means burning the “buds” where the horns would grow in. Not fun, nopers! But having a goat with horns is not good either. They are hard to rehome, and can be dangerous. Anyway, a good friend of Stu’s family is going to help us out with that part. He has experience with calves and has the iron that we’ll use. We just need to get a little tip for it to fit the goats. I’m glad we’ll have someone who knows what they are doing to help us out for the first time or two.

Well, better get to it. I need to spread some pine chips in the chicken coop and let the Ladies out to wander around a bit.

Toodles!

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