The Chook Story: Part 2

I think that this will be the last Blog on our chooks, but I did say, in my last account, that there were downsides to free-range chooks.

It covered the free-range chooks' downside i.e. consumed by wily predators.

The other downside is from our point of view.....the constant and ever-changing search for the eggs. We have to be "egg detectives"

So can you guess the rest of the story?

Our current chooks, numbering 2 (one died of unknown causes) have been trying to outwit us re their eggs.

Do they use the upmarket, stylish laying box provided in their pen? Have they got something against laying eggs in a cut-down plastic 20 litre container?

It seems as if they have.  If we can't collect eggs, we can't keep chooks....or so we say.  And if they don't lay eggs where they should, we have to find them.

After serious detective work, involving following the chooks around the yard at a discreet distance, we found their first outdoor nest.  It was under the stairs (of an old Queenslander house i.e. on stilts) in a lily. Yes, that's correct. In a plant. They'd obviously squirmed around until they'd created a bowl-shaped indentation in the lily plant, and there they laid their eggs.

We were very pleased to have discovered their hide-out.
We were too smug, too soon.

After collecting eggs from there over the next week, suddenly there were none. Yes, they'd obviously outwitted us, and had found another spot.

There followed a repeat of us letting the chooks out of their pen,then following them around the yard, all the time trying to appear nonchalant!  (Can't let a pair of birds work out that we were tracking them!)

Their 2nd "nest" we found in a shed, at ground level, in a pile of straw.
We again collected eggs from there for about another week, when, as you've guessed, they upped camp and moved on. Beaten again by chooks!

Repeat the detective work.
Their new nest is on the tank stand, which is covered with creepers. To a chook, it must be like laying an egg in a tropical rainforest.
They have to flap their wings to get up to tank stand level...about a metre above ground. This is not quite up to our "flying chooks" standards, but a sort of minor levitation.

This time we have left 2 eggs in their nest, hoping to convince these birds that we have not found their secret cache. The eggs are marked, so that we know to only collect the recently laid offerings.
In the first photo you can see, amid the greenery of creepers and vines, the old eggs with the identifying black marks.

The photo below shows our current poultry population of 2 beautiful hens, freely roaming the yard, and probably plotting, in chook-talk, how they'll bamboozle us next!

      That will be the end of my chook tales for now.