When Pippa hatched her chicks under our front veranda in September and we finally (after fifteen months of her being 'our stray chicken') decided to give her official pet status, we had some great expectations.
D has two eggs each morning with brekki and he was so excited about the idea of no longer buying them from the supermarket and having surplus to give away and possibly sell.
While D busily hammered away at Pippa's coop, I started storing up egg cartons. We drew Pippa up a coop repayment plan to cover the three hundred dollars spent on materials for her new house (spare the rod, spoil the chook?), and at fifty cents per egg Pippa and her chicks were looking to be debt free in well under a year.
Pippa recommenced laying just a week after entering her new coop; things were humming away nicely, but for the last five weeks she has been a big boring broody bird, sitting like a statue on her imaginary eggs and not laying any real ones.
We gave her time, we gave her grace, but today grace ran dry and we decided to give her the dunk. It's a method used to cool down a chicken's underbelly which in turn is meant to snap them out of their broody state. Some think it's cruel, but I find watching her for weeks on end with that vacant far-away look in her eyes, not moving, drinking or eating much, puffing herself up like a big black pompom every time one of us or her chicks gets too close much crueler. Plus it's been a thousand degrees in her nest box lately and knowing that she is spending almost all of her time in there makes me nervous that one day I'll go down to find a Kentucky Fried Pippa.
So, here's hoping that the dunk method works and Pippa will be living up to our egg-spectations again in the very near future. Just one more month and her chicks are due to lay, so our egg cartons should soon be full and overflowing with a daily harvest of fresh home grown eggs!
