Good morning, all. Tiffanie here. I have hijacked the blog this morning to write about a neat, first time experience we had with our chickens yesterday.

Back in September, we traded a couple of goats that we had for some of our chickens. In that group of chickens that we traded for was an ameraucana chicken. These chickens are commonly called “Easter Eggers.” This is because their eggs tend to come in pretty colors.

Our ameraucana is roughly seven months old. Typically, chickens will start laying eggs around the age of six months. However, if they reach this age during winter, it can take a little longer. Another factor that will play a role in egg laying is if the chickens are stressed out. For example, if you move a chicken to a new home, it can take a few weeks for them to settle in and start laying eggs again, even if they were laying daily before the move.

We have had a hard time with our chickens laying eggs. For starters, they love to hide their eggs. We let our chickens free range, and can’t always find their eggs. They are fantastic at hiding them! When we first got the chickens, they spent the typical time being stressed out and not laying eggs. After that, we had a couple of weeks of non stop rain, which caused several of our chickens to drown. We ordered some baby chicks at the end of August, and all of those died from a common disease that chickens get called coccidiosis. As it is now winter time, most of our chickens have halted or slowed their egg laying.

A few weeks ago we went out to the chicken coop and found that one hen was sitting on a pile of eggs. We assumed, apparently incorrectly, that she was trying to hatch these eggs. A week or so after this, we found the eggs unattended and decided that the eggs had been out there for too long to be good to eat, and the chickens were obviously no longer interested in hatching these eggs. At that time, we broke the eggs for the chickens to eat.

Yesterday was such an exciting day. When we went out to check for eggs, we found a beautiful blue egg. This means our ameraucana chicken has laid her first egg. We do believe this to be her first one, as it is the first blue egg we have found. It is slightly smaller than the brown eggs we find, but this could be due to the fact that it is her first egg. At any rate, we are looking forward to collecting more blue eggs in the future. At this time, we plan to eat these eggs because we do not have an ameraucana rooster to fertilize her eggs.