Wednesday, August 4, 2010

The Egg Song

No, we at the farm are not taking up music. We'll leave that to folks who know how to play instruments or wait until someone teaches us the finer points of banging on the cow bell.

The Egg Song is the name used for particular clucking hens do when they want to tell the world how proud they are that they are either going to lay an egg or have just performed the miraculous deed. We can't say that they shouldn't be proud or want the world to know how talented they are - just imagine trying to do what they do.  But we really wish they would do it more... quietly.
Ginger's first egg.  It's hard to tell, but it's pink.
Louise's first egg, a soft minty green

When we first decided on chickens our big fear was smell. We'd visited farms and petting zoos and realized that, well, chickens stuffed in a pen and left to it smell terrible. We made the commitment to keeping our chickens clean and reacting swiftly to the first whiff of something nasty. We routinely sift poop out of the run and clean the coop weekly. We can confidently say there is very little chicken stink here.

But who knew chickens would make so much noise?

Obviously, not us.

Three of our hens have begun to lay and each has decided that she needs to do so at a different time of day. So far we have one who hollers first thing in the morning, another at noon, and the third, kindly waits until 3. You might think that a chicken singing a few times a day isn't a big deal, but it turns out that when one chicken decides to sing the others have to join in too. Three times a day we have the chicken chorus screaming this:

An Egg Song

(Note: this is someone else's chicken singing.  We'll post our own song once we get an audio of it.)

In the end, we have to thank goodness it's not as bad as this:

The EGG SONG