Bianca laid an egg in my hand!!

I'll copy my journal entry here when I get time to write it.

It was freakin' AWESOME!

 

August 21, 2007
This has been an exciting week in the chicken yard. Thursday, Miss Prissy laid her first egg! I was surprised; MP was sort of the dark horse in the egg-laying sweepstakes. Bianca, Mae West, and Jane Marple had been checking out the boxes and fussing a lot; I figured one of them would be first. MP followed up with an egg on Saturday. Sunday, Bianca laid her first egg; I found a second egg that day, but don’t really know who laid it. [I should mention that they’re all “pullet eggs,” that is, golf ball-sized beginner eggs. They look rather lost in the egg carton I saved for them. ]
Today, I was down in the yard, watching the chickens scratch around. Bianca the Drama Queen kept fussing and flapping up to perch on my shoulder. She’d stand there and complain in my ear, then fly down to walk around and complain to the world in general. She kept going in and out of the coop, trying one nest box after the other. After about an hour of this, she settled down in a nest box and began rearranging carefully selected wood shavings. Naturally, ten minutes after she got in, Jane decided that she wanted to get into a nest box and it had to be the one Bianca was in. She paced along the perch, looking anxious and emitting very loud bok-bok-bok-baGAWK!s. I didn’t want her to drop an egg while on the perch, and Bianca wasn’t doing anything, so I picked Bi up and cradled her while Jane hopped into the box. About 30 seconds later, Bianca started to fidget and I felt something strange happening near her tail. Out popped an egg -- right into my hand!
It seems like a miracle to me that the chickens can make something like an egg inside their bodies -- and do it over and over again throughout their lives. But to feel the egg being laid . . . That was AWESOME!!