This may be a complete waste of time…

…but what the hell. Time, I’ve got.

The Leghorns have always had the very annoying habit of all laying their eggs in one spot as a flock. This causes breakage and hassles like trying to steal a dozen eggs from under a laying hen who’s emitting ear-splitting screeches and stabbing your hand with her beak the whole time. It’s also comical as hell to watch 3 hens literally sitting on one another, with sometimes a line of others waiting their turn. I’ll give them credit for queuing very politely but it makes no sense when there are five other nesting boxes in the chicken house.

Right now their favorite nesting spot is a commercial plastic box Landlady got from somewhere. It’s right next to 3 wooden boxes I made for the Rhode Island Reds, which the Leghorns will sometimes sit in but almost never lay eggs in.

It has been suggested – on what evidence I don’t know, I just heard it somewhere – that maybe the Leghorns don’t like those boxes because they’re too open; maybe they just like smaller spaces. So this morning I woke up with the bright idea of building dividers to make those spaces smaller and more secure …feeling? It’s just a thought.

…which came on the heels of the first practical thought I had upon waking this morning, which was that I left some scrap wood for Ian’s targets in front of Landlady’s barn, we didn’t use it all, and I should cut it up or haul it away before it annoys Landlady. If I brought some plywood and tools to morning chicken chores I could make some partitions really quickly.

They’re just sitting in there. My thought is that the chickens can shove them over to suit themselves, and maybe that will make those boxes more attractive. Probably not, their habit of all laying in the same place probably isn’t predicated on a particular box size since they sometimes all use a bucket or even just an out-of-the-way corner for a while. But we’ll see. It just bugs me, is all.