Molt

...

Our chickens are molting.  It's a sorry sight.  They all look like they've been beaten up in a dark alley in some part of town where chickens roam into dark alleys.

 

Because we can't trust our own memories, Robb and I keep a calendar on the fridge that tracks the laying patterns of our hens.  Each hen has her own color, and we track the time at which we find their egg.  We tally at the end of the week, to see how everything is going.  We tend to get about seventeen eggs a week, from our four hens.

If you look closely, you'll see that Isabella (light aqua-green) took most of the summer off, and only started laying eggs in Mid August.  You'll also notice that the girls tend to lay for number of days, and then take a break.  You may even see that they lay progressively later and later in the day, before they take their egg-laying break.

So, now that the hens are molting, and their bodies are busily re-growing all of their feathers, how's the egg-laying going?

Yup. 

We actually broke down and bought eggs at the store last week.

And the back yard looks like the fallout from an explosion at a pillow factory.  Or like a dangerous part of town, where urban hens get mugged.