Farm Sitting Part 2: What's that got to do with the price of eggs?

Movie quote--any takers?

For the most part, the two and a half day stint at farm sitting went very smoothly. No one jumped the fence or got sick. However, I made a few relatively benign mistakes that made things a little more interesting.

Fed after the cats and dogs, the chickens got an ice cream size bucket of feed twice a day plus six or seven handfuls of wheat as scratch in the morning. In the evenings, I collected the eggs. I officially started my farm sitting experience Wednesday evening and so got to collect the eggs right off. I don't know if this is standard farm procedure, but the chickens had a dark box where they laid their eggs. The box opened into the storage part of the barn making egg collecting rather easy.


Two of those eggs were not laid in the box. There were a few hens who preferred more light when they felt the urge to lay, but they were consistent with the placement and I never had to go looking for eggs. Here's a picture of the "rogue" eggs:
There were actually two sections to the chickens. One with about eight hens, and another with two hens and a rooster. When the owner walked me through everything, she said that she thought she saw a chick in the second section, but hadn't verified it. Neither of the hens in this section laid their eggs in the boxed area (a different one from the one in the picture) and you had to move the hen out of the way to get at the eggs. The owner told me to just grab the tail feathers and show her who's boss.

When I went to collect the eggs from this section, I did just that. And that was my mistake. There was a chick (I could see it) and I got soundly nipped as I tried to move the hen to get the eggs. It wouldn't have been so bad if I had used my head (not to gather the eggs). Everyone knows that you don't bother a mother with young and I did it anyway. Yes I had seen the chick and I did it anyway. To make matters worse, I hadn't worn gloves so I got a nice peck on my palm. It wasn't more than a scratch, but it stung throughout the rest of the chores (or maybe that was my pride). Here's the ferocious hen and her baby.

The rest of the hens and rooster were never a problem. Of course I never tried to grab their tail feathers.
Thanks to these obliging chickens I haven't had a store bought egg for a while.