Good news and bad news

This morning Amber laid her seventh egg and it was her second normal shelled egg. I have been giving the girls limestone flour and their egg shells ground to a powder in their morning mash and it seems to have worked. The shell on Ambers egg feels hard and she laid it in the nest box. Well done Amber!

Shortly after Bluebell laid her egg. This afternoon I checked on the girls and Pepper and Honey were missing so I knew they must be in the nest box together. I grabbed my camera thinking I might get a sweet photo of them together.

I was shocked when I lifted the lid of the nest box and saw that Honeys comb was bleeding.

Pepper and Honey want to lay at the same time and the red spots on Honey’s comb are fresh blood

I was even more shocked to see Pepper hold Honey down and peck her already bleeding comb. Honey would run out then return to the nest box and Pepper would hold her down and peck her comb again. I felt sickened. Poor Honey’s instinct to lay in the nest box was so strong that she kept returning even though she kept getting pecked. Pepper was equally determined that she wasn’t having her in the nest box.

I had to act quickly and I put the plastic divider on the nest box to separate it from the coop. I then picked up Pepper and put her in the nest box and closed the lid. When Honey returned to the coop I closed the coop door. This would make it dark in there and I hoped that would allow her to lay her egg on the coop floor.

I felt really cruel shutting them both in their separate compartments but I couldn’t bare to let them go on trying to both sit in the nest box while poor Honey was repeatedly having her already bleeding comb pecked.

I checked them frequently and at one point I let Pepper out of the nest box. She hadn’t yet laid (Pepper takes the longest of all the girls to lay her eggs), and she was really distressed when she found the coop door shut and couldn’t get back in. I picked her up again and returned her to the nest box.

I opened the side of the coop to check on Honey and she had made a nest on the coop floor between the perches and the side that opens. She was calmly sitting so I decided to leave her.

I went back a little later and checked on Pepper. She had laid her egg so I let her out and then opened up the coop and removed the divider. Honey came out of the coop without laying an egg. I couldn’t believe she had put herself through all that and wasn’t even ready to lay. She really doesn’t seem to know when she is ready to lay.

Peace was once more restored and Honey bounced back as if it had never happened. This is another problem that we need to try to solve. My husband suggested we put the spare coop back in as a second nest box.

I put it on the patio with the ramp facing the corner between the storage cabinet and the fence. I hope this will keep it dark and make it a suitable place for egg laying. It remains to be seen how long it will take for the girls to find it and if they do, will they want to use it! It’s worth a try though and if a situation like today arises again, I can pick up one of the girls and put them in the second coop instead of adding the divider. Whether they will stay in the coop to lay remains to be seen.

The little coop to become a second nest box

The ramp facing in to the corner

I will close the ramp at the end of each day so that they don’t sleep in there as I would have to be up early to let them out, while the big coop has the automatic door opener. I hope this will solve the problem but it’s a case of waiting to see. Just as things get better  there always seems to be another problem to solve!