Henrietta, the Golden Buff hen, has started to lay!  She is such a nice girl, and seems to be very attached to Comb, the Rhode Island Red rooster.  Her eggs are medium sized and delicious.  She has a pleasant demeanor and seems to get along very well with the chicks.  The most interesting thing is that since she’s the only one laying right now, I know she is laying in a different nesting box every time as I’m playing hide and go seek with her and the latest hen fruit.  I recently put a 30 pound capacity feeder in the coop and yesterday found that Henrietta had laid her egg on the top of it.  Nice.

The other Golden Buffs and the fifteen Black Rocks are getting big very fast.  These eating and p**ping machines are as entertaining as the flock of Reds.  When I am leaving for work each day, I must plan an extra few minutes to spend with them as they pile along the side of the run, dare I say, begging for a treat.  I always oblige with some bread,  apple cores, or whatever I have available.

The other night, we had another unfortunate experience.  I asked Lindsay to freshen the coop drinking water and on his way out to cutting wood he went to the coop to do just that.  Wallace, the very happy husky mix dog, was right alongside Lindsay – until he got to the coop.  Wallace pushed by Lindsay and grabbed a chicken and my poor girl met her maker.  I heard Lindsay loudly scolding someone or something, not knowing what had happened, so I hurriedly hobbled out the door; saw Wallace looking absolutely normal and Lindsay blocking the door to the coop.  You already know what happened.  The other chickens seemed stunned.  I never before saw all 20 of them stand still long enough so I could count them.  In an effort to calm the group, I got my best folding chair and a handful of breadcrumbs and sat in the coop with them, talking to them, soothing them, and they began sitting on my lap and eating.

Now that the weather has begun to turn colder I expected that Team Coyle would be spending most of its time in the coop, but I am very surprised, every morning, when the run door is opened and the chickens burst through it as if launched by an air gun.  Good for them!!  If Doug Heath’s chickens can come out in the winter, why can’t ours?