Mommyhood Adventures: Egg Watch

We are on egg watch here at the backyard chicken coop. Three of our chickens are 18 weeks old this week and two of them are closer to 19 weeks. And from all my research, most chickens start laying between 16 and 24 weeks depending on the breed. We are so excited about the prospect of walking into the coop and finding a beautiful egg that we check on the chickens several times a day. We haven't found one yet but believe me I will announce it to the world.

Oreo, our black sex-link, is one of the younger chickens but we are sure she will be the first to lay us an egg. Her comb and wattles have fully grown and became very red when she was about 15 weeks old it was then I knew it was time to start switching out the feed and add a dish of oyster shell free choice in the coop. Then a couple weeks ago she started acting like she was going to lay soon. She is nesting like she is preparing for an arrival, constantly building nests everywhere she can. One of those nests is in the bushes in the back yard – not where I want her laying eggs. What has thoroughly convinced us that it will be any day now is the afternoon she started clucking and pacing around the coop totally agitated and somewhat confused. And I kid you not, her facial expressions are exactly that of a girl who just started her cycle and was really not as prepared to deal with all of what comes with that as she thought. She kicked every other chicken out of the coop and kept pacing back and forth completely confused about what she should do next. We put her in a nesting box and let her stay in there while she kept clucking. After a few more minutes she started playing with the straw in the box and checking everything out. Then she just stopped and looked at all of us humans (me and the girls) who were staring intently at her.

Oreo in the Nesting Box

She had become completely calm and acted like nothing was wrong. She jumped out ate some food and drank some water then went out to the run with the other chickens. Everything she did was exactly what a laying chicken does (from everything I have read) when they are going to lay. The only difference… no egg! I was so bummed that after all of that, there wasn’t a prize in the box. A few more times she has behaved just like that since then and every time we see her, we very quickly put her in a nesting box hoping she gets the idea that if she feels like her bottom is going to explode (seriously I feel for those girls going through that almost every day) she will hop in a box herself.