The End of an Egg-Eater

Collecting eggs is usually an easy and peaceful job. It’s as simple as opening up the backdoor of the mobile chicken coop, scooping the eggs out of the empty nest boxes, and putting them in a basket. A gentle pat on the backside of any hen who decides not to get up when I open the door is usually enough to get her to move for long enough to grab the eggs she is sitting on.

From time to time, I come across the odd hen who decides that she is not going to move, no matter how many times I gently nudge her on the backside. They are prepared for war, and they make sure to land a peck or two on my hand before I have what it is I have come for. It can be a bit sad to take those eggs. In this weird way, it kind of seems like kidnapping.

I have less patience for those chickens who have figured out that their eggs taste pretty darn good. Every once in awhile, a nest box will have a broken egg or two, and it’s clear that it was no accident. Some little chicken got hungry for eggs.

Realizing you have an egg-eater is the easy part. Catching the egg-eater is where it gets difficult. After all, there are better things to do than sit in the chicken coop all day waiting for someone to get hungry.

Some people claim that egg-eaters can be reformed. When the livestock manager here realized that someone had developed a taste for pasture raised eggs, he tried two of the tricks that supposedly can cure a wayward hen:

1.     Putting golf balls in the next boxes. Perhaps this will convince the egg-eater that their previous experiences were aberrations. The hope is that they will begin to think that eggs are actually solid and not full of delicious yolk.

2.     Putting curtains over the nest boxes. If they can’t see the eggs, they can’t peck the eggs.

These tricks of the trade failed to convince our chicken to turn over a new leaf. So, last week, when I saw a hen hunched over a nest box containing a broken egg, yolk dripping from her beak, something told me this might be our egg-eater. Luckily, at that moment, I remembered a lesson Greg and Maureen taught me during my first week at Gentle Giant. If you are trying to catch a chicken, screaming and running at it full speed is not an effective technique.

After I captured the egg-eater and placed her in the most spacious jail cell ever, an abandoned horse stall, with a bit of water so she could wash down her snack, I alerted the livestock manager to my discovery. After thinking it over, he uttered the words I was hoping to hear: “Do you feel like chicken this weekend?”

Lesley and I were both excited to practice the butchering skills we had learned from Greg this summer. It’s not that we have a thing for killing chickens, but we wanted to make sure that we still remembered how to do it properly. 

After the egg-eater’s sentence was carried out on the chopping block, Lesley held her upside down to make sure she bled properly.

This summer, Greg’s mechanical chicken plucker could remove nearly all of the feathers in around 15 seconds. We didn’t realize how good we had it! It took us more like 20 minutes doing it by hand.

Here is our chicken moments before we put her in the stockpot. For two years, she provided the farm with countless delicious eggs. For one week she provided us with several chicken sandwiches and four quarts of rich and tasty stock. She is gone, but not forgotten.