We have a problem with our chickens. The problem is that they aren’t laying any eggs, and haven’t been for quite some time. Actually, that’s not quite true – they are laying eggs, sometimes, but the eggs come out without shells on. Instant unpoached eggs. Yuck.
There might be all sorts of reasons for this. One of the most obvious (so obvious that we didn’t think of it at all, it having been suggested by a scientifically minded cousin) is calcium deficiency. Looking back, this seems likely. The grit we used to give the chickens used to have quite a lot of ground seashells in it – these days it looks more like gravel.
What’s a boy to do? Or a girl, for that matter?
If you want a job done, you do it yourself. It was time for some serious seashell gathering. Cromer beach, for all its charms, was out, because it has very few shells. Crabs are king – the most common (or least infrequent) mollusc is the slipper limpet (Crepidula), although you can find a few whelks (Buccinum), dog whelks (Nucella), winkles (Littorina) and very rare top shells (Calliostoma), chitons (Lepidochitona) and other stuff. But it would take a lot of hunting to get the volume of shells we needed.
Along the coast, though, we knew that Holkham Beach would provide rich pickings. And so, earlier today, off we went, pausing only at Picnic Fayre in Cley to get posh picnic grub.
Holkham beach is among the most spectacular beaches in Norfolk, if not Britain. The scale of it is staggering, and hard to appreciate in mere photographs. Here’s a view from our picnic perch atop the dunes, themselves quite some distance seaward of the beach car park.
Crox Minima is sitting beneath the hat (bottom left). The three tiny brown blobs you can see on the horizon are horses – Holkham’s enormous expanse of sand is a Mecca for riders.
This is the beach when you finally reach it.
Everywhere on this endless, endless expanse of sand are razor shells (Ensis) interspersed with oysters (Ostraea) and cockles (Cerastoderma). The razors, in particular, are found in enormous drifts, where you can scoop them up by the handful.
Where razors come to die. Mrs Crox and Canis croxorum on the horizon (right), for scale.
Having got a bagful of shells
we hoofed it back to the car park. We’d set off in fine weather. However, we were plagued by insistent scattered showers, which chased us up the beach…
… and settled in to a rather sharp and autumnal downpour. Once home, I set up my sophisticated, high-tech shell-grinding operation.
which aroused interest in the target audience.
Let’s hope they start laying eggs again! Honestly, the things we do for our livestock.
Beautiful beach. Notify at me when Gallus gallus recover of unpoached eggs, let me know. Interesting.I've always wondered if the ancestors of the hens will have been dinosaurs, honestly.
I'll certainly let you know if they start laying eggs again, Alejandro. When we got our ex-battery chickens, many of them had very few feathers and looked just like little velociraptors. Mrs Crox came in from the garden and said 'It's like Jurassic Park out there'.
I hope they start laying shelled eggs again. The lack of calcium is the most likely cause. An alternative hypothesis is that the eggs are going through the reproductive tract too fast, not remaining in the shell-gland long enough, thus resulting in membranous eggs. That is sometimes a problem with farm and lab birds, but unlikely to be a problem with your chickens as they are free-range, exposed to natural photoperiod and generally loved
That's an intresting notion – that rushing-through-the-reproductive-tract idea. Not sure what we can do about it if it's true. I do have a suspicion, though, that age is a factor.Six of our chickens are bantams and don't lay many eggs anyway (no more than 90 eggs per bird per year), being largely ornamental. We've had them for a while, though – the eldest are three years old, which, for all I know, could be beyond reproductive age for a chicken.Four, though, are ex-battery chickens, bred to lay eggs often – of the order of 300 per bird per year. One of these chickens died last week, apparently of old age (she was otherwise in tip-top health). I have a feeling that these industrial egg production units are simply getting old. I suspect that the breeding of battery hens exploits the evolutionary trade-off between reproductive output and longevity – so they lay enormous numbers when they are young, and die early. Our dead 'un can't have been older than two years.Now, were we smallholders, we'd turn the lot into chicken soup and get more young birds. But they are, as you have guessed, 'generally loved'.
Yup, old age will do that, unfortunately…I knew when I started seeing membranous eggs in my quail it was time to replace the breeding colony with younger birds….