Bad Vibes? And a Bear

Hen jungle gym

The hens had stopped laying.

Our five Buff Orpingtons were only 16 months old. And as far as what I’ve learned about laying hens, they should have a couple of years at least of steady egg production. But in this hot and dry July, each day when I checked the nest boxes, I would be disappointed.

We’d already experienced weeks of only 1 egg per day for the whole flock. Then two weeks went by with no eggs. Zilch.

When it comes to factors that might impact laying, John and I reviewed the usual suspects:

Was it the heat? Our girls definitely had not been acclimated to extremely hot weather when the big heat wave hit at the end of June. And since then, the weather has been very warm or even hot.

Was one hen, or several hens molting? Molting is a phase when nature gives laying hens a break for their reproductive systems and they don’t lay eggs for a while. Also, a hen will lose a lot of feathers—and there had been loads of feathers all around our girls’ pen.

Fright? I thought I’d heard the hens making their alarm squawking frequently the last few weeks, so maybe some wildlife was getting a little too close and fear was impacting their laying. In this busy summer, John hasn’t gotten to weed-whacking the underbrush next to the pen. Unfortunately, that means there’s plenty of good cover for a stalking coyote or bobcat.

Despite all these possibilities, I figured I knew the most likely cause: Broodiness.

This summer, we’d been dealing with one hen after another turning broody. When a hen is in egg-hatching instead of egg-laying mode, she doesn’t lay eggs. I had to wonder, if each broody hen was giving off some kind of pheromone/broody chemical that was affecting the other girls.

In other words, bad hen vibes.

Needless to say, I was getting discouraged. Days on end with all the labor of hen-caring, but without the reward of fresh eggs!

A little history: Before we got our first flock, John built the whole hen-pen complex around a huge, old, big leap maple stump. What can I say? It was on the site we’d selected for our hens, and we figured the craggy stump would make an entertaining climbing structure for hens. And I have to say, all our hens do like to hang out on it.

More importantly, though, the stump was way too huge to try and remove or dismantle in phases… Or even prune.

Plus…it’s maple! A super hard wood. And despite various parts of the stump that were decaying, lots of other parts of it were live wood. So that stump was here to stay.

The stump’s elderly age, though, hasn’t kept it from sending out shoots of new growth. And even the smallest branches are too hard to trim without a giant pair of loppers.

Anyway, recently—again, the busy summer—I’d let the new growth get a little out of control.

Then last week, I was doing a thorough tidying up of their pen. Worming my way behind the stump and the new branches, I checked for any droppings I’d better pick up. I looked down and Lo and Behold: a cache of eggs!

A wintertime view of all the stump shoots

Those darn hens had been laying this whole time, but not in their nest boxes. For some reason, their tiny bird brains told them to lay in this new, hidden spot!

So maybe there really was something to my bad vibes and broody hens theory…Because interestingly, this little egg-laying hideaway was the furthest spot away from the nesting boxes the broody hens were always sneaking into.

So there I was, finding 8 eggs that I had no choice but to throw away. As I understand it, the shells of farm eggs are covered with a kind of “bloom” or a layer of protection that’s washed away during egg processing. As a result, farm eggs are far less perishable than store eggs.

Still, by my calculations, some of these eggs had been out in the heat for weeks—I couldn’t imagine that they would be safe to eat.

So, 8 eggs wasted. Now it was up me to set the girls straight. I crammed a bunch of small wood debris in their laying spot, to direct them back to the nest boxes. I figured I had solved the problem.

Are you hearing a “but”?

Yes. Well, the hens did not return to their nests—all 3 of which stayed empty the next 2 days.

Instead, they shimmied their way past the wood debris and found an even more secluded hidey-hole to lay in. I know this because yesterday, I found 4 more eggs behind the stump!

At this point it was dawning on me that hens were a lot smarter than anyone gave them credit for.

I complained to John, our in-house keeper of common sense, and naturally he had an easy solution. “Why don’t you just put up a fence barrier?”

Feeling stupid, I said, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Wisely, John didn’t reply.

So yesterday, I got a bunch of poultry wire fencing and crammed it into the space, covering every inch of the hidey hole. 

And ta-da! Today I found 2 eggs. In the nest boxes.

Early this morning, I'd seen a hen from my kitchen window up on the stump, appearing to look forlornly down at the hidey hole--the she jumped off the stump. I’m not going to get too cocky, though. I’m sure the girls will come up with a way to make extra work for me!

PS…Bears. If you’ve followed this blog for awhile, you’ll know I’ve mentioned seeing black bears in the neighborhood. Our private lane has new bear scat on it nearly every day. But in our 16 years in the Foothills, I’ve seen probably 10 or so bears. Young bears, big bears, Mama bears with cubs.

But all from a comfortable distance. Like 50-100 yards distance.

Not today. A couple of hours ago, I was riding my bike out on the main road, about 1/3 mile from our private lane when to my right, I saw something black in my peripheral vision. I glanced over, and there was a large black bear up on its hind legs, no more than 20 feet away!

It was close enough for me to see its eyes, glittering dark in the midday sun.

I instantly recalled hearing that black bears can run 40 miles an hour. That meant it could have reached me in seconds, far faster than I could pedal away.

But before I could react, as soon as the bear saw me it dropped to all fours and lumbered further into the brush. I've also heard black bears are shy; still, one thing’s for sure: I’ll be sure to be extra attentive on that stretch of road!