2013 Final Egg Tally

Now that 2013 is officially behind us it's time to count up the number of eggs our flock produced. First, the good news: There were months where we struggled to keep up with our egg consumption. Now the bad news: It's been a long time since we had that problem. In fact, our ladies haven't laid since October. Even then it only covered one breakfast! Given the age of our chickens they hadn't hit their peak performance last winter. The short number of daylight hours means we didn't start getting eggs until February and nothing of any significance until March. Things were cruising along nicely for a while. Then we got a puppy. His presence seemed to stress them out, and Sara went broody around the middle of June. We tried to break her, but she was extremely stubborn. In fact, the only reason why she came off the darn nest box is to molt. Whitney went on her own strike in August for no apparent reason, but Butters and Tina pulled through until the fall when they hit their own molt. 2013 Egg Chart by Chicken Butters: 158 eggs, average 21.5 in full production months Sara: 83 eggs, average 20.3 in full production months (all of 3) Tina: 164 eggs, average 22.57 in full production months Whitney: 103 eggs, 20.2 average in full production months 2013 Egg Chart by Month January: 0 eggs February: 21 eggs March: 86 eggs April: 94 eggs May: 91 eggs June: 73 eggs July: 60 eggs August: 40 eggs September: 40 eggs October: 4 eggs November/December - 0 eggs The Americauna's are clearly leading the charge both in number of laying months and average number of eggs per month. The best part is we love the breed, so we plan on getting two more Americauna's this spring. The Barnevelder's don't have a great disposition for a backyard flock, and their egg production doesn't make up for it. While they are a fine enough chicken, we won't be getting more. Thankfully though, Sara has redeemed herself somewhat. After six months of being a free-loader, she is finally laying again. We aren't quite sure when it happened since we weren't consistently checking the box for eggs, but there it was last week when I checked. This makes it a full month earlier than her first egg last year. Now if we can just keep her from going Broody....