An Eggs-traordinary Story!

On Valentine's Day, we became aware that something we thought was one way was really just the opposite.

It all started about 5 months ago when our daughter found a chicken in her yard. After trying in vain to locate the owner, she offered the chicken to her mom and dad. Since we have backyard chickens and being the bleeding heart clueless folks that we are, we said "Yes!" with nary a thought.

We brought the chicken home, did an internet search and discovered that she was an Americana breed, a chicken that lays pretty light blue or green eggs. We were thrilled since all we have are brown egg layers.

Heidi, out in the yard because she's too much of
a chicken to be with the chickens in the coop.

Flew the Coop

We tried to acclimate the little hen into the coop with the other chickens, but she refused to identify herself as one of them. Every time we put her in the coop area to get to know the other girls, she "chickened out" and found a way to escape to the other side of the fence. Then the other chickens decided they didn't like her anyway and were relentless in their efforts to run her out of Cooptown.

Of course, it may have had something to do with the fact that all the "good vittles" are outside the coop area. - grass, bugs, worms and the compost heap. YUM! But, when the new chicken wasn't raiding the compost heap, she was often hiding from some frightening thing - like the new watering can. So we named her Heidi.

As the weeks continued to roll by we waited for Heidi to lay the first of what we hoped would be many green/blue eggs. We figured she just needed to get used to her new environment. So we gave her time.

Ruffled Feathers

And then one day the unexpected happened. My daughter (the one who gave us the chicken) and her family dropped by for a visit and they brought Lily with them, their mini Australian shepherd. At one point, we missed Lily who had been inside romping with my dogs, Sophie and Tucker.

When my daughter found her, she was in the backyard and had been playing "round 'em up" with Heidi and the other scaredy-cat chicken, Ninja Chic (they are both terrified of the other chickens). Heidi and Ninja Chic were pretty shaken and had sacrificed many of their feathers to Lily, but not a drop of blood was shed. Needless to say, my daughter was mortified and Lily is now on probation with a tracking bracelet on her ankle.

We saw the feather-reduction incident as just another delay in Heidi's egg production. So we waited and waited for our new girl to pay lay up. He feathers grew back in over the next few months, but the eggs were as scarce as hen's teeth (pun intended), which she had none of either.

It was then that we faced up to the cold hard facts that Heidi most likely was over-the-hill, past her prime, a tough old bird, not even good for eating. Heidi, it seemed, was in "henopause".

But since she was such a nice little hen we decided to keep her anyway. That was mostly because we knew of no one who would take in a chicken, like we had done, who could not earn her keep. Then again, it had something to do with the fact that we, being the bleeding hearts we are, could never bring ourselves to butcher a chicken for the skillet. (Though we like to think of ourselves as urban farmers, we'd certainly be the laughing stock in the real world of farming.)

We figured the reason Heidi turned up at our daughter's house was because her previous owner wasn't as naive nice as we were and when she stopped laying, they gave her the boot. No sense keeping an old chicken around that can't earn her keep.

The Pulitzer Prize Pullet Surprise!

Fast forward to Valentine's Day. Robert had gone out in the morning to tend to the chickens. I was inside when he yelled to me, "Sharon, you've gotta get out here now!  Get your shoes on and get out here!" I thought something was terribly wrong and he needed my help.

Once outside, he directed me to the orange tree. There beneath the tree, beside a moss-covered rock, in a little hollowed-out spot was a clutch of about 14 pretty pastel blue-green eggs. Heidi, it seemed wasn't such an old bird after all. She was not in henopause at all. In fact, it just the opposite. She was a young chick - a pullet. And there under the orange tree was her "pullet surprise"!

We laughed and laughed. I still laugh every time I think of it or go out to bring in another one of her pretty little blue-green eggs. She is now very productive, laying almost every day. We couldn't be happier! Heidi has certainly added a bit of surprise, delight and some very egg-citing days to our lives.