Why Did The Chicken Go In The Goat Barn?

Well, we have been quite the farmers today! I woke up excited to go check in the chicken coop to see if anybody else was gonna leave us some eggs, and I was not disappointed! I found one brown egg in one of my nest boxes (oh you have NO idea how satisfying that is!).

We did eat our first green egg yesterday morning when I did not have enough eggs to make omelettes. Can you figure out which one it is? I'll give you the hint: its the really yummy dark orange chock full of vitamin E from all that healthy sunlight perfectly spherically yolked egg!

Next on the agenda was a road trip... to pick up another goat! I got an email from Laurel Haven saying that they had a buckling available at a reduced price because through a series of unfortunate events, they were unable to have him disbudded as a baby and now he has horns, which is a big no-no in the dairy goat world. She was planning on weathering (castrating) him and selling him as a pet, but she said he's so conformationally sound that it just killed her to do it. He's her first kid from a flashy boy by the name of Sharpie, who's a whole kettle of fish and then some. I was planning on buying a buckling from her in the spring, and I really wanted one of Sharpie's, so... its a match made in heaven! Louie has reached the point in his life here on the farm that he's finally gotta be separated from the girls since they'll be starting to give birth in a week and I don't want him messing with them or possibly re-breeding them. He's got horns (almost all Angoras do, apparently, I'm not sure why they aren't disbudded, too), so a little Nigerian Dwarf buck with horns would make an ideal pen-mate for him. I'm not sure what to do with Lucy... the whole reason for Louie to be here is to breed Lucy, and they're best friend's so I hate to separate them. But on the other hand, if I put her in the buck pen with Louie and the new Nigerian buckling, there's always the chance that the wrong buck will breed her and I'll end up with a Nigora baby. That's not so bad, but completely defeats the whole purpose of having Louie here. So we'll see. I guess I'll just have to consent to taking her on dates with Louie when she's feeling amorous.

Anyway, we packed up the family and made the 2 hour trip to Laurel Haven and picked up my little guy, and on the way there finalized his name. He had not been registered yet, so we got to pick the last part of his name. The first part is of course Laurel Haven because that's the herd name he was born into, so his full name is now Laurel Haven's Lucky Puck. It was a tossup between Puck and Bugaboo, and Puck won. I suspect Bugaboo will resurface as a buckling or weather name in the near future, though. :)He's a cute little fella and is handling the move like a champ. This is his first time away from his mom (I feel so wrong taking a baby from it's mother you have no idea), so he's inevitably going to cry for a few days. He's already let us hear what he's got this evening, as he's locked in one of the new stalls in the goat barn while everybody gets to know each other through the slats. I also want to give him some time to adjust before I set him loose out in the pen to discover electric fencing. It's been quite an experience for them all that first day, as everybody but Tierra had never experienced it. Tierra took one look at it and said, "No, I'm good."

In all the excitement of installing Puck in the goat barn, I stumbled upon a really fun surprise. I had placed a large dog carrier in the corner of the other stall last week just incase Harmony or Sahara would want a place to hide. When I grabbed it to move into Puck's stall, I saw this behind it. It was a perfect little hollowed out nest in the corner of the stall with eggs in it! (Notice how dark green that one egg is...fascinating!) Apparently some chickens have been sneaking in here and laying for heaven's only knows how long! I burst out laughing and ran to get Dustin and Ayden. Just then a brown hen came in and plopped herself down ontop of them. I told Dustin that he should take a peek inside the carrier to see if anybody had been in there, and he found 6 green eggs in there, too! So apparently my chickens have been quite busy and just failed to alert me to that fact. The brown chicken then got off the clutch of eggs in the corner and parked herself on the eggs in the crate, and here's her picture doing just that. As a mother myself, it feels so wrong to take a chicken's egg when she obviously wants to sit on it and make some babies. But, considering the fact that she's left them each night to go roost in the cozy chicken coop, I know there are not any babies in those things. I did finally take her eggs when she left the carrier, and I even placed the smaller cat carrier in the corner of the coop with some nice leaves in it for any chickens who'd prefer to lay in that. I don't care where they lay them, as long as I can find them. Right before we left to go get Puck today we noticed that one of the black hens was copping a squat in one of the nest baskets in the coop, and sure enough there was a perfect little brown egg when we got home! So, in one day we were able to gather... are you ready for this?

A DOZEN EGGS!