You were a good chicken. I don’t know what happened to you, but you eventually ran out of lives. I hope your last month was warm and restful.
We are smug too.
October 10th, 2010 § 1
My friend sent me this article from salon.com about a $300 chicken. Love it.
Good Egg!
October 2nd, 2010 § 0
Two days ago, I got two very different eggs for my breakfast. I wish I knew what we had fed the chickens that week to get a few eggs with bright, bright orange yolks! I’ve found that the more orange the yolk is, the more delicious it is.
I would also like to say that I am in a 7 way tie for 2nd place out of 500+ people in our football pool. Some people doubted my abilities, but my teams have shown them (thus far)! This has nothing to do with chickens, eggs, Manhattan or anything else, but I wanted to say it anyway. So there.
Chickens are messy
September 28th, 2010 § 0
The worst part of all of the rain is what it does to the chicken coop. I don’t know how people could ever keep them dry on grass! Even on concrete, the coop is a muddy stinking cesspit after the rain. Poor Soup has mud all over her feathers but the other chickens are perfectly clean. Oh little Soup, what do you do during the day while I’m gone?
Today one of the little tan eggs had a tiny white silkie feather stuck to it. I think I can say for certain that all four chickens are laying.
More Gender Confusion
September 15th, 2010 § 1
Word on the street is Kung-pao laid two eggs.
She is one confused chicken.
Also, yesterday my friend left this link on my facebook wall. I love their furry feet!
Chicken Tuesday
September 14th, 2010 § 3
The General was looking very fine the other day.
She also seems to be laying eggs in the coop rather than in the nest box. This morning, it occurred to the boyfriend that maybe she is too big for the nest box. While she was one of the littlest chicks, she is definitely the largest of the four chickens.
More Articles About Chickens
September 12th, 2010 § 0
This woman is crazier than I am.
I wouldn’t let any of my chickens free range in my house, but I like the last paragraph.
Local Collection
September 11th, 2010 § 0
My only hobby that is not particularly environmentally friendly is keeping a saltwater aquarium. I do try and be conscientious of where and how my fish have been collected and I always purchase aquacultured (not harvested) corals. In the summertime in New York, we can actually collect tropical fish ourselves. Because of a trick of the gulf stream, pellagic fry get caught in currents around Florida and whipped up north. The currents run very close to shore off of the coast of Long Island, so it’s easy to wade out and net tropical fish. These fish will all die come October/November because the water gets too cold for them. It’s easy to see the way the northern waters take a toll on their immune systems as most of the fish we catch later in the year are sick when we pull them out of the water.
This time I took an ecologist friend of mine along, as she was interested both in the tropical strays and the fish local to New York. We catch a lot of young blackfish and flouder right off of the shore, but as those are game fish they are always thrown back. There are also lots of Northern Puffers.
This puffer was not harmed in making this photo! We made sure he deflated and set him free again.
We also found some awesome whelk eggs this time around.
Each ring contains tons of snail eggs. When they rupture, the snails are “born”. We rinsed these off to collect local copepods and microalgae and then put the eggs back.
Dragging the net it hard work – this is what it looks like when we are pulling the net through the water. The bottom is muddy and it is full of rough eel grass that lacerates the skin. But all in the name of science and the aquarium hobby.
As far as tropic strays, we caught….
Spiny Box Puffers. I suspect these guys are starting to colonize more northern waters as we have been pulling out larger and larger ones as the years go by.
Filefish.
Two short big-eyes. These guys are nocturnal, so it’s pretty easy to scoop them out of the water with a hand net if you see them in the day time. They are also really easy to see because of their bright coloration.
Spot-fin butterflies …. this photo is from my fish tank a couple of years ago when we also caught a ton of these guys. I spoke to a friend of mine who grew up on Long Island and he said he remembered going to the docks when he was a little and seeing tons of these guys swarming around the pylons.
We also got coronets and a snowy grouper. Unfortunately, we did not not get any seahorses this time around. I’m starting to think that they are super seasonal in their distribution as I can’t remember ever getting any of them past July.
Finally, our best friends on these adventures are always the seagulls.
Evil bird is watching you.
Souper Duper
September 6th, 2010 § 2
Soup remains our …. special chicken. Sometimes she puts herself to bed, but more often than not she’ll roost in the doorway of the coop until one of us comes out and chucks her the rest of the way in. She’s the lowest on the pecking order and still hasn’t produced any eggs. She also doesn’t have the sense to come in out of the cold.
The other day it was pouring rain. When the boyfriend and I went down the check on the chickens, Soup was sleeping with her head out in the rain.
This is what a sad, bedraggled silkie bantam looks like. We toweled her off as best as we could and set her among the aspen bedding where she went back to sleep. I fear when it starts to snow and she falls asleep in a snowdrift. The only frozen chicken I want comes from my freezer.
The First Breakfast
September 5th, 2010 § 0
We have started eating our egg bounty. We’ve probably gotten about 1.5 to 2 dozen eggs since they’ve been laying. Tandoori lays every day without fail, whereas the other two are laying a little less frequently. We gave away a half dozen to our friends who take care of the birds while we are away.
Either the General or Robot keeps laying these massive double yolk eggs. We’ve gotten two of their eggs thus far that are double yolkers.
When we had our first breakfast, we cracked and cooked a commercial egg for comparison’s sake. The word on the street is that the commerical eggs have lighter yolks that have less integrity. We have found that to be absolutely true – I’m not sure if you can see the different color very well in this picture, but once you scramble them up the color different is very apparent. The yolks do stand up better.
The other big difference we’d heard was that commercial eggs have much thinner shells. We did notice that it took more effort to crack the backyard eggs than commercial eggs, but since I’m a scientist I wanted more empirical evidence.
So we measured! As it turns out, the commerical egg came in a 0.0016mm thick, Tandoori’s egg came in at 0.0021 and the double yolk egg came in at 0.0028. While this is a small sample size, I’d say the data generally support the idea that the backyard chicken eggs are thicker.
And, if you’re wondering, the boyfriend had his first eggs fried whereas I had mine poached on toast.
They were delicious.