Why does my egg contain two yolks?

June 4, 2014 Eggs No Comments
Monster egg

We occasionally find jumbo eggs in our nest boxes, but I’m pretty sure this is the largest one we’ve ever seen!  Those are ordinary-sized (large) eggs on all sides of the jumbo egg, getting ready to be turned into a homestead lunch.

 


Fried eggsIf you’ve kept chickens for long, you probably know why the jumbo eggs show up — they’re so big because they contain double yolks.  Usually, a hen releases a new yolk to start the egg-making process about an hour after the previous egg has been laid.  But sometimes she accidentally releases two yolks close together, and those yolks end up getting enclosed in the same shell, create a double-yolker.

 


This type of minor egg-laying problem is most common among pullets just coming into laying and among old hens coming to the end of their productive life span.  Our jumbo egg showed up in our chicken tractor, where our only older hen lives, so I suspect the old girl is the culprit.

 


According to the internet, one egg in a thousand contains two yolks, but you’ll never see a double-yolker if you stick to commercially-raised eggs.  The industry candles each egg and discards double-yolkers, even though the issue is merely a cosmetic problem.  I’m not sure if that’s a reason to raise your own laying hens, but it’s an interesting factoid!  (And the delicious taste and high nutritional value of pastured eggs definitely make them worthwhile to raise at home.)

How long before mulberry trees start fruiting

June 2, 2014 Posts No Comments
mulberry update

This is one of our Everbearing
Mulberry trees in a chicken pasture.



We started seeing a few fruit
last year, but this year has more than I can count.



The chickens like to hang out
underneath it for the shade. I’ve heard if your tree is at least 5 feet
tall within a few years fruit can start to show the third year. On the
other hand if your tree took 5 or 6 years to reach that height then
maybe you have some issues with the chosen site. Stay tuned to see how much this
tree feeds our flock when the fruit starts to fall to the ground.

How to tell male and female ducks apart

May 30, 2014 Posts No Comments
Ducks and comfrey

If you purchase (or
hatch) straight-run chicks or ducklings, one of the things you’ll be
most interested in learning is how to tell the boys from the girls at a
young age.  Back in 2010, I was just learning to sex young chickens, and now the time has come to do the same with ducks.



I’m assuming in this post that you don’t want to vent-sex your ducks, even though that is
the definitive and official way to sex young poultry of all
sorts.  I’ve never actually vent-sexed a bird, but the process
sounds very traumatic for the youngster, so I generally figure it’s
better to wait until the differences become more obvious.



Duck beak colorWith
waterfowl, the best unintrusive way of telling the drakes (males) from
the ducks (females) is by voice.  When our ducklings reached three
and a half weeks old, I started to notice that their whispery baby
voices were being interrupted by a quack now and then, a sound that only
female ducks can make.  If you want to be certain of the sex of
your waterfowl, wait until they’re eight weeks old, then capture them
one at a time and listen to their alarm calls — the females will quack
and the males will make a different call that’s supposed to sound more
like “wongh.”



Dave Holderread reports
that you can also sex ducks by bill color if the ducks are
purebreeds.  (Hybrids often have bills that are harder to link to
sex of the bird.)  In several breeds, the bill of a male duck is
grayish or greenish from a young age, while the bills of females can be
yellowish with a dark tip or can be dark brown with some orange. 
In most cases, the bills of female ducks are darker than the bills of
drakes by the time the waterfowl reach two months old.



One final method of
sexing ducks is to wait until the birds are four or five months old and
attain their adult plumage.  At this age, drakes generally have
curled tail feathers, and in many breeds, the heads and backs of males
are darker than those of females.

We’re still in the
waiting stage with our duckling-sexing project, so I don’t know how many
ducks and drakes we have in our nine-bird flock.  I plan to keep
all of the ducks and one drake, so the more girls, the better!