Chicken-n-Veg

Posts Tagged ‘pullets’

Unfortunately Matilda, one of our ex-battery hens, passed away just before we went on our summer holidays. She had been the top of the pecking order since we got her and had always been a healthy looking hen. Her illness came very quickly. We found her collapsed on the ground one afternoon, in obvious distress, and an immediate visit to the vet was unable to save her.

Additionally, a month or so earlier one of our other hens, Bluebell, had disappeared. We presume she had somehow jumped over the electric fence sometime during the day and wandered off. She never turned up again and there were no sightings by our neighbours. These losses left us with only four hens and one of those was an ex battery who appeared to be enjoying thoroughly enjoying her retirement and laying very few (if any !) eggs. This meant we were getting just two eggs a day, at most. When we returned from our holiday we therefore decided to buy a few more hens.

We ended up buying four point of lay Cotswold Legbar pullets from the local (founder) breeder, Legbars of Broadway. They lay pastel coloured eggs which are predominantly blue (although 15% lay pink or tinted eggs). The Cotswold Legbar was developed at Broadway in the Cotswolds about 20 years ago. Apparently the breed comes from the Cream Legbar, an auto-sexing chicken breed that in turn descended  from three Chilean Aracuna hens bought back from Patagonia in the 1920′s.

Our new hens were about 16 weeks old were already quite striking with their yellow feet, crests and lovely colouring. They had spent the last month or so roaming outdoors in fields surrounded by poultry netting. This meant our garden arrangement, with electric poultry netting protecting a large run was not too much of a shock to them. As advised when we bought them, we kept them physically apart but within sight of our other hens for a week (using a temporary hen house and run). This was to get them used to each other before bringing them all together. It seemed to work very well and we had very little trouble when we did bring them together last week. There were a few minor squabbles as their place at the bottom of the pecking order was established, but we saw no serious bullying by our older hens.

They’ve all been named now – Daisy, Bella, Priscilla and Adam (the name choice of our two and a half year old son !).

We are hoping that they will start laying in the next few weeks and are eagerly waiting for our first coloured eggs

I think all, or almost all of our younger hens are now laying. It started off a week ago, with one tiny egg in a nest box (see photo above). In the following days we had a number of soft shelled, broken eggs in the perching area and some more smaller eggs outside the henhouse as well in the nest boxes. By the end of the week, however, they seemed to have got the hang of how and where to lay their eggs. For the last few days we have been getting two or three smaller eggs in the nest boxes, along with the larger eggs laid by our ex-battery farm hens. We haven’t had any soft shelled eggs for at least five days.