Dust bathing and another girl getting ready to start laying

Dandelion and Cinnamon are such a close little pair. They can often be found sharing a dust bath, they keep each other company in the little shelter and they perch together at bedtime. They are never far from each other.

Dandelion and Cinnamon in a dust bath together

Dandelion and Cinnamon also have matching head pins. I thought that Dandelion had stopped wheezing but I could hear it again the last couple of evenings and I could hear it while she was dust bathing. She looks fine but I don’t like the fact that she can’t seem to shake off the wheezing.

I have extended the tylan in the water to seven days. The use by date on the tylan is the end of July so I may as well use it but want to keep enough back in case February has really bad weather which may set Dandelion back again. Once I have used my current supply of tylan I will order some more to keep in stock.

I think that Jasmine is getting ready to lay. Today she looked in the shed and the nest box and settled in the nest box for nearly an hour. I thought it was going to be her first egg but she left the nest box with no egg.

Jasmine in the nest box

I think she is practising and will probably start laying soon.

It seems that the girls are all getting ready to lay and we may well have them all laying before long. We are going to have an abundance of eggs.

There will come a time soon when I will no longer be able to tell which eggs belong to which girls unless I actually catch them laying. This morning I caught Spangle laying and her eggs are narrower and darker than Marmite’s eggs and Smoke’s eggs are rounder and larger but once there are quite a few more girls laying I know that I will lose the ability to tell them apart.

The bigger girls are easy because Ebony’s egg are beige while Flames eggs are white. Speckles lays so few but her eggs are white and enormous and so are easy to tell. Nine little girls laying will be a different matter though.

I will just mark any unknown eggs with a stroke like a five bar gate. It means my end of year egg record will look quite different this year.  It is going to be interesting to see how many eggs we will get this year.