We've been down in our egg supply, the hens giving us five or six eggs a day, down from a high of 12 during the summer. Dwayne blames old hens (they're "retired", thank you very much) and the change of season. Well, he discovered yesterday another reason: someone has been laying her eggs outside. There are 14 eggs in this little pile, not deep inside the hen pen where we would never find them but hidden behind a clump of asters. Dwayne was tipped off by an egg lying out in the open and when he looked around to see if there were anymore, he found this cache.
And rotten! He dropped one inside the coop where he took the collection to wait for transport to a far-away location (no rotten eggs allowed in our composter, I guess).
This is not the first time this has happened.
In 2009, when our flock was it's biggest, around 24 hens and a rooster, Stella was intensely interested in the bushes behind the garage, the kind of behaviour that made me realize something was in there. It was a hen, soaking wet from a heavy rain the night before, sitting atop a pile of 19 eggs. That had been going on for weeks -- and we hadn't missed her! It might have been in the spring when we let the hens out to roam free before putting the gardens in because I remember thinking it was a case of egg-tortion.
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