We have a chicken who, suddenly, won’t come home at night. Her name is Esther, and she’s one of the chicks that hatched early this spring.
She’s always been a little elusive, more like her daddy, the standoffish rooster Scotch, than her mama, Pickles, who is very sweet and likes to sit on our laps.
I couldn’t figure out why Esther wasn’t coming home, and it concerned me—we can hear owls (notorious chicken predators) at night, and we’ve seen coyotes and heard rumors of a big wild cat in the area. So I decided to stalk her and figure out what was going on. I even bought an outdoor camera, but it turned out I didn’t need it.
It was an offhand comment my husband made, wondering if she possibly had a clutch of eggs somewhere. That was unlikely, I told him. She wasn’t laying yet. But, I started investigating. Esther would turn up every other day, waiting outside of the coop at the crack of dawn when I got there to let the chickens out, but she’d quickly disappear again. There was no noise that might have signaled her flying over a fence or up into a tree. So I decided to crawl around down in the deep bamboo that marks the back fence of our yard. It turned out that Esther has her own special chick-hatching thing going on.
Esther herself was an uplanned pregancy. Or maybe eggnancy? While I was up in New York this spring, the guys forgot to bring in the eggs, and by the time I got home, it was too late. But I wasn’t unhappy about it—one of the Silkies was foster-mama-hatching three blue eggs from two of our blue egg layers, Pickles and Toot, and I wondered if the cross might produce a chicken that would look like their dad, a fluffy Silkie, but lay little blue eggs like the moms.
As it turned out, the chicks look more like the moms, Pickles, who is a Cream-Crested Legbar, and Toot, a White Legbar, and less like dad. The chicks were Esther, Gremlin, who looks like Esther but with less vibrant colors and more gray in the tail, and Clementine, a cross between Toot and Scotch. My fingers have been crossed since the beginning for hens, not roosters, and it turns out Gremlin, who I’d been worried might be a roo, started laying eggs earlier this week.
Esther has clearly been in business for some time, laying the most perfectly shaped small blue eggs. I’d noticed them about a month ago but thought it was Toot, laying smaller eggs.
Esther wasn’t behaving like a chicken that has started laying eggs does—usually they become a little bit more docile and easier to handle. She’s still a spitfire if you get too close, one of the only chickens who won’t eat snacks out of my hand. But when I found her there was almost a dozen eggs in the little nest she’d carefully hollowed out and lined with feathers under the bamboo. It takes 21 days from the day the mom starts sitting on the eggs for them to hatch, and I have no idea what to expect here, but if you know anyone who wants chicks, please send them my way!
Last night when I realized Hurricane Francine was going to hit and leave us swamped with rain today, I did the mad dash to clean up an old portable coop and carefully bring Mama Esther and her eggs up near the house to someplace that would stay dry and safe. Esther was definitely not happy with me—I think I now know what dinosaurs sounded like based on the angry chittering she directed at me while the move was in progress, but now she seems happy and settled in.
Esther was definitely a lot happier to have Bella checking in on her than me this morning, before it started pouring.
While Bella took a peek at the eggs, the proud grandmas-to-be were strutting around the backyard as if they knew something exciting was just weeks, maybe days, away. We’re all tucked in tight from the storm tonight.
I’ll keep you posted on chick progress.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
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