This is how you know your hens aren’t getting enough calcium.
This 2 year old Rhode Island Red, named Rita, has been going through her first molt. She also has been very popular with our roosters, too. She just started laying eggs again after a rest period of a couple of months. All of my hens have slacked off on egg laying and I’ve been lucky to get a total of 1-3 eggs a day from my 11 laying hens.
(This is Betty, our Barred Rock laying an egg. Listen closely towards the middle of the video and you can hear her straining to push out her egg)
All of my molting hens’ resources are now focused on re-growing feathers. But a hen requires a lot of calcium to help her form strong eggshells. Obviously Rita isn’t getting enough, as you can see from the egg breaking as it is laid.
So, I have been upping the calcium levels around here, mixing in crushed eggshells and crushed oyster shell in their feed, as well as offering it free-choice in a dish. The hens also receive the milk leftover from my kidlets cereal bowls and sometimes a few spoonfuls of yogurt, too.
Hopefully I’ll be seeing strong-shelled, intact eggs soon. We’re all looking forward to eating lots of breakfast burritos again.
21 comments :
I love it when you post pictures of your hens! They are so beautiful.
hellllllllllllo chicken....
I just love your chickens. So who would have thought chickens need calcium?
makes total sense!
HOw have you been my friend???
My hens are also slacking off, in fact when I went around asking friends if I could get some eggs from them, they all said the same thing! I ended up buying eggs at the store for the first time in a year and a half. All my girls laid straight through the winter last year, but now I'm getting 1 egg every other day out of 5 adult hens, and I have about 10 pullets who haven't started yet - 4 might start soon, the other six probably not until spring. I don't know why everyone is having low egg output this fall. I blame the government ;-)
I often wondered why some of the eggs I get from my SIL's chickens have a very thin shell...I'll have to pass the info along...thanks!!
The eggs are the only thing cracking up at my place.
That looks like Pam and FarmMan's nest boxes, nice.
Yes, I keep a bucket of oyster shell in the chicken coop. Our poultry always get lots of kitchen leftovers and goats milk too.
The hens are probably thinking "must you film me in this intimate moment?" LOL!
A little chicken education! I couldn't help but wonder... child birth was so NOT fun... imagine having to do that every day! Poor chickens! LOL! Okay, I'm thinking wayyyy to much into this, aren't I!
Hey Lisa,
The girls keep you pretty busy LOL chickens are always so ugly when they molt LOL
We always told customers, when I worked at the feed store, that if you put a 200W light or stronger on a timer for 16 hours of light the chickens will lay year around. Some people like to give them a rest though. It would probably take a month for them to really start producing again under the light, Just FYI :0)
Thanks reddunappy,
I've actually been keeping a 60watt bulb on in their hen house 24/7 ever since they moved into the coop as pullets. This is mainly because some of my chickens are/were too dense to figure out to go into the house at night and would push themselves into a ball, in a heap, on the ground until I came out and picked them up and put them in their house. lol!
So, for the past two years, they have a light on in their house all day....all night. They have laid year round for me, or at least several of them do. I've only had maybe a day go by without an egg, and that's just started a couple months ago. I still get between 6-12 eggs a week, so I really shouldn't complain.
But some of these ladies could pick it up a little bit more and stop being slackers. lol!
Maybe if I use the 200 watt bulbs that would happen. What do you think?
~Lisa
LOL maybe they would Lisa LOL
Just keep in mind a 200W needs a higher rated recepticle, for fire danger :0)
Your hens might need protein too. She was eating the yoke too. I through meat scraps in my chicken coop. It seems to help.
sfg
Don't they look so scraggly when they're molting? My four hens aren't laying right now either.
Who knew laying eggs had so much more invovled than mother nature!LOL
sfg,
I thought of that, too. But they do eat meat scraps every few days (we don't eat meat every day). And the milk and yogurt that we feed them daily does have protein in it, too.
We could try to up their protein and see if that works. But I think if their eggs break they will eat them anyway. As you probably know, you can't place anything in front of a chicken that they won't investigate with their beaks.
Last week, I found a dead/drowned mouse in a water bucket and I tossed it into my chickens and they devoured it in just minutes!
See! Well, there ya go...mice have protein in them, too, right?
LOL!
~Lisa
I never realized hens could have a calcium deficiency. Guess it makes sense though. See? Learn something new everyday. =)
Well that was mighty interesting!! Thanks for sharing!!
Very interesting..:-))
Hi Lisa,
We keep oyster shells for our chickens here and when we were wanting eggs for the incubator we had a light on a timer for 15 hours a day.
Love how Betty looked in her nest box! Bless her little heart!
Have a great day.
Pam
Mmmmm. Breakfast burritos. I like to use eggs to make those, french toast, and hard boiled eggs for a snack. I've always wondered what "molting" meant. It's kind of scary. I'm sure I would have thought the chicken was dying if I saw one with all that skin and bones showing through and didn't have you to explain it to me.
never knew hens needed calcium too...you learn something new every day...good photos...
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