Yesterday, as I came home from town, a roadrunner ran in front of my car! I slammed on the brakes, leapt out, and took photos:
Here she is in the road. And below, in our neighbor’s field. Roadrunners are the state bird of New Mexico, and they prefer running to flying - although they can fly. They are members of the cuckoo family, and can run 20 miles per hour. Roadrunners are predators of everything horrible that lives in New Mexico: scorpions, tarantulas, and centipedes. Don’t get me started on centipedes. I found the dead body of a centipede in my house. It was museum quality. I mean, this was no wimpy northern centipede. It belonged in a zoo. I initially thought it was a frond from a Norfolk pine. Seriously. Ew.
Anyway, roadrunners are one of the few species fast enough to prey on rattlesnakes. Yay, roadrunners! We think we have a nest of them just across the road.
Meanwhile, there’s been big excitement here in our flock of chickens. We have 17 hens. But we’ve only been getting 2 or 3 eggs a day since Thanksgiving. It’s winter, and the chickens don’t lay as many eggs when it’s dark so much of the time. Also, Jan had gotten some new chickens who were too young to be laying yet.
But yesterday, we got our first eggs from the new chickens! Look:
The brown eggs are from the hens who have been laying since before November. The weird, brown/green egg is from Top Hat, my favorite chicken, who had taken a break in laying and just resumed last week. But the two blue-green eggs are from the new chickens! The ones who have just started laying. And look how small those eggs are! Especially the one on the top - compared to the normal-sized brown ones. Jan says sometimes, if the chickens start laying when they’re very young, they’ll lay eggs that have no yolk. Some people call the yolk-less eggs, which are even smaller than the ones in the photo, fairy eggs. The chickens don’t lay many of them, and each subsequent egg is larger, until they reach normal size.
Here’s a photo of Top Hat (who lays the weird colored eggs):
She’s the lightest colored hen in this photo - to the left of the wooden divider.
You can see several of the black hens to the right. They are among the young ones who have just begun laying eggs.
It takes a hen 24-26 hours to make an egg, and most of that time is spent on the shell. It takes about 20 hours for a hen to make the shell, and then another hour to put the color on the shell. Then they spend a final hour putting what’s called “bloom” onto the shell. It’s a protective coating, like a cuticle. It protects the egg from bacteria as it leaves the hen and begins its life in the laying box.
Chickens were domesticated only about 8,000-10,000 years ago. In Asia. And they weren’t even domesticated for their eggs or their meat. They were domesticated for cock-fighting. Sheesh. These cock-fights were used as prophecies for up-coming battles. If the King’s rooster won the fight, everyone figured that meant the King’s army would win the battle. Anyway, from Asia they spread to the rest of the world. Compare that to dogs, who were domesticated 14,000-15,000 years ago. This is all according to the Smithsonian, who also tells us that the domestic chicken’s genome was mapped in 2004. The chicken was the first bird - and, therefore the first descendant of a dinosaur - to be domesticated. Although, our chickens’ immediate wild ancestor is the Red Junglefowl. Red Junglefowl continue to live in the forests of China today.
During the 800s, Pope Nicholas I decreed that a rooster should be on the top of every church. He said it was a reminder of the prophecy that Peter would deny Jesus three times before the cock crowed. Look around, especially at old churches. Many still have roosters on their weather vanes.
Several nights ago, we forgot to feed the feral cat community. Remember Jet? The cat who loves the chickens? She is part of a feral community that lives near our house. Jan has neutered them all, and feeds them every day.
So, when we realized we hadn’t fed the cats, Jan went out to fill up their dishes after dark. She has a couple of different dishes in different places, but the one Jet mostly eats out of is a little plastic container in the chicken yard.
When Jan opened the gate to the chicken yard, there was someone eating out of the container, and it wasn’t a cat. It was a skunk! There is a skunk living underneath our chicken coop and Jan caught him stealing cat food! See the corner of the chicken coop? It looks as if someone has dug under there? That’s where the skunk dug a place for himself to live!
Well, we won’t be setting out cat food in the chicken yard after this. Jet will just have to come around to one of the other food locations.
We had suspected that a skunk was living somewhere nearby. Every now and then there was a suspicious aroma. But, now that the skunk is confirmed, we’ll have to be extremely careful to shut the chickens in right at sunset. Skunks will kill chickens if they get access to them - and not just one chicken. If they get into a coop they’ll maul a bunch of them and not even eat them. But, skunks are nocturnal, so as long as we shut the chickens in at sunset, they’ll be protected.
Thank you, chickens, for our eggs! We’ll do our best to keep you safe!
