I am finding it more and more difficult to live in harmony with the chickens. In fact, I am ready to wage war with the ladies. Our mother-daughter relationship is strained because they are deceiving me and hiding their eggs. Even though I am paying to feed them, they are not feeding me. Each afternoon is like Easter morning around here. I troop off to the coop to collect my expected 8-9 eggs and gather 3. Then I have to survey the perimiter weeds and the garden for the remaining eggs, carrying around my half-empty egg carton. All the while they are cackling and chiding me; just daring me to find the latest nest. There are about 4 chickens that have figured out how to consistently get out of the fence surrounding their coop and have declared themselves free-range chickens. This is not as much of a problem now that they can't cause much harm to the mature vegetables, if only they would lay their eggs in the coop. Their nest boxes are clean, dry and sufficiently dark , but aparently it's not good enough. I placed golf balls in the nest to fool them into thinking I wasn't stealing their eggs and that has not worked. I wouldn't mind as much if they laid them outside in the same place every day, but as soon as I find a nest, they make another one the next day. I do not feel safe about selling or eating these eggs, for I can never be sure how long they have been out there; if they have been in the wet fog or bushes for a day, are they still safe to eat? Although we move the coop and fence often, we are looking into electric net fencing and other ways to keep them in. Their wings are already clipped so they aren't going over the fence, but on our uneven surface, they find plenty of room to go under the current fence. It would take a lot of egg-selling to make electric fencing kind of money.
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