Egg Eating in the Coop - Nabbing the Perp
It was a Thursday. I was working graft at a local chicken joint. Some hardboiled feathered dame was chiseling the house - chewing eggs. I had my peepers on the action for most of the day; I’d been through a pot of joe and a couple dozen Krispy Kremes when I finally spotted something fishy.
It’s hard sitting tight all day long watching all the birds dipping their bills and flapping their wings–It’s hard just playing the snooper angle and waiting for something to go down. I got so fed up that I was just aching to go in and squirt some metal, break up the flim-flam, and clean things up. But this time all that op work paid off – it looked like I had the goods. But was it airtight? Could I send this cluck up the river? Could I put her in the big house? Well, pal, you be the judge.
I’ve been doing surveillance on my coop and it makes me feel like I’m living in one of those film noir stakeout movies – Bogart, Cagney, and now Randy trying to get the drop on the chiselers.
The Problem:
If this was a Bogart movie, we’d be talking the numbers racket, or bags of cash, or a diamond bigger than your fist. But this is chickens. One of my hens, apparently, has developed an unnatural craving for eggs. What I know for sure is that I’ve frequently been finding one of the nest boxes slimed with egg innards – always the same nest box. The crime-scene/nest box is one of two side-by-side extra-large boxes. I call them the “luxury boxes.” Because these boxes are so large, two hens often occupy each box at the same time. Is it possible that two hens in a nest box is a problem? That the hens maybe start squabbling and that eggs are getting broken during the commotion? Or is it a case of a stealthy cannibal hen jumping into the box, pecking into an egg and slurping down the contents? For more background on the egg-eating story you can take a look at my March post, Could Coop Cam Clarify Cannibalism Conundrum? Conceivably! Yep, I spent some time working out that title and I’m very proud.
The Solution
In the movies, this is where the flatfoots would park their drab Buick in a dark alley facing the coop, fortify themselves with lots of coffee, and surveil the flock around the clock.
In real life, I installed a camera directed at that nest box. It runs 24/7 and is recorded and monitored by a Camect hub, which sends an alert every time a chicken enters the nest box. With the system in place, I just need to wait for a broken egg, review the alerts for the time period leading up its discovery, and see who was in the nest box, and what she was up to! You can get the scoop on the camera, Camect hub, and the installation in my April post, Connecting a Camect Camera System in My Coop .
Cut to Action
Thursday – 1:59 PM: That’s me gathering eggs. Right away I see that there’s a broken egg and that the whole nest box and its contents have been polluted with egg stuff. I gather one small brown egg with glued-on egg innards, nesting material, and random nest box detritus. I irately toss out the slimy nesting material and gather a gunky green egg. Then I irritably fling out the broken green egg. If this clip had sound, you would learn the amazing extent of my vocabulary.
Naturally, as soon as I was done collecting eggs, I went to my computer, pulled up the Camect alerts, and spent a couple hours finding out what happened earlier that day!
12:41 PM: Gilda enters the nest box, doesn’t settle into the nest but instead faces away from the opening in a sort of crouch for a solid ten minutes. Her head is moving up and down. Is she eating an egg? Probably, but with the positioning of the camera it’s impossible to say for sure. This clip shows her at the end of the ten minutes as she’s leaving the nest box. Notice how she wipes her beak several times. More proof? She’s back at 1:33 for around four minutes and is doing exactly the same thing again!
Have I captured my egg eater? Let’s see what else Camect has recorded.
12:54 PM: Between Gilda’s visits, Zelda hops into the nest box and does the exact same thing as Gilda—she faces the back of the nest and it is fairly obvious that she’s pecking at something. Is she eating an egg? Probably; there’s even a piece of nest material in her beak as she leaves, which she spits out. But if she is snacking on an egg, it’s probably the same egg Gilda was working on, so it’s already broken. Is egg eating a crime if the egg is already broken? I’m gonna say “no.”
If eating an already broken egg is not a crime, then the pertinent question becomes, “Did Gilda break the egg or was it already broken?” So lets back waaay up.
8:05 AM: Nicky jumps into the nest box, settles in, and leaves at 9:20. I’ll surmise that when she hops out, she’s leaving a green egg behind.
9:54 AM: Venus enters the nest box and settles in.
10:25 AM: Zelda hops onto the roost bar and tries to enter the nest box. Venus stands her ground. The contest begins. Over the next two hours they take turns driving each other out and sitting on the nest. Sometimes, they’re both in the box and they’re not acting like BFF’s. There’s a lot of hen rasslin.
Like this clip from 11:44 AM
By 12:00 Noon, it’s back to just Venus in the nest box. Zelda perhaps has achieved her mission and laid her egg. So by noon, there are two eggs in the nest box, Nicky’s from early morning, and Zelda’s from sometime later in the morning. I will suggest that sometime between 10:25 and noon, during Venus and Zelda’s aggressive territorial contest, one of those eggs was broken.
12:32 AM: Moe shows up and says, “’Scuse me, Venus. I need this nest box to lay an egg.” Venus says, “AAARRRGGGH! This is it! I’m done! I’ll go lay my egg somewhere else!”
Moe leaves at 12:40, Gilda hops in a minute later and says, “Scrambled eggs! Yum!” A bit after that, Zelda shows up and says, “Scrambled eggs! Yum! It may actually be my own egg. I don’t find that a bit creepy!” A little more than an hour later, I arrive on the scene and say, “Scrambled eggs! Drat! Zounds! Curses!” And there you go.
To Summarize
Here’s my theoretical synopsis of what happened.
1- Nicky lays a green egg.
2- Zelda and Venus spend a couple hours fighting for the nest box, during a period of time when it’s in Zelda’s possession she lays an egg. Sometime during all that tussling an egg gets broken.
3- Moe drives Venus out of the nest box and lays an egg right in the middle of the mess with complete oblivious bliss.
4- Gilda and Zelda slurp up the contents of the broken egg.
5- I find the mess: Two green eggs, one whole and one broken and mostly consumed, and one small brown egg.
And Next
It appears to me that two hens ate an egg in this situation. The evidence points toward the egg already being broken when they ate it. Are these the only two or have other hens been eating broken eggs when they discover them? If hen fights in the large nest boxes are really the cause of the sporadic broken eggs, maybe the large boxes need to go away. There are nineteen hens in the big coop, and eight nest boxes including the two big ones. Six nest boxes should be enough. So, I’ll close off the two big boxes, and move the camera over to the six small boxes. Will this solve the problem? The camera will be watching. Stay tuned.
