Keeping Chickens

Pullet Egg

We started last Saturday getting two eggs per day but after the fox attack on Sunday, this has gone back down to one per day.

One can only presume that ‘Dandelion’ had started laying before her ‘untimely end’ - hence we’re back to one pullet egg per day for the time being, whilst ‘Softie’ and ‘Ginger’ mature a bit more.

Pullet Egg On Right Hand Side - Supermarket Egg On Left

The pullet egg is noticibly smaller than a egg you’d buy in the supermarket, understandably so I suppose.

The dictionary definition of a pullet is; a young hen, especially one less than one year old.

So they’re ‘teenage’ chickens so to speak, smaller than adults and their eggs are therefore smaller.

We have noticed that there’s been a soft shelled kind of egg laid in the hen house today. So perhaps Softie or Ginger are getting close to being ‘mature’ enough to lay pullet eggs.

Fingers crossed that we may have more than one egg per day come this weekend.

Soft Shell Egg Laid By Pullet

The egg looks kind of funny, and it’s squidgy.

Toby came running in this afternoon saying there was a egg, so we went and looked and saw this.

It wasn’t in the ‘nesting box’ area, it was by the perch. It was in the area that they seem to do their ‘poos’ in at night.

‘Blackberry’ is noticibly now more mature – ‘grown up’ and chicken like, than Softie and Ginger.

Although Softie and Ginger are also coming along nicely and their comb and wattles are growing bigger and redder as the days go by.

Blackberry Has A Larger & 'Redder' Comb & Wattle

Blackberry also seems to spend more time ‘sitting’ than the other two.

Don’t know whether this is a sign of her ‘age’, or whether she’s conserving energy due to her egg production!

As you can see from the top image, our pullet eggs are a nice brown colour when compared to the supermarket bought eggs.

We’re still fighting over who has the ‘home grown’ egg in the morning and generally Toby wins the day!

Hopefully as the other two mature into pullets, we’ll get more eggs and there’ll be less need to fight over the eggs in the morning!

We’re still no closer to building a purpose made chicken run. We’ve had a few quotes and have decided to wait and save some money up.

For the time being the chicken will stay in their chicken house and only be let out into the garden ‘under supervision’ – for obvious reasons, we’re scared of another visit from Mr Fox.

They get out every day for most of the day time, but if we’re out we put them back in the chicken house with the ‘downstairs’ run.

Hopefully tomorrow we’ll have two pullet eggs for breakfast!

Related posts:

1. Chicken Lays An Egg!
2. Fox Kills One Of Our Chickens
3. Fox Kills Chicken… The Morning After
4. Eggloo, Egloo or Eglu?
5. Cleaning Out The Chicken House