Sorry, I wasn't very clear with my explanation. The picture isn't of the two eggs New Sophia laid yesterday, it's just meant to show a variety of the eggs I get and how (EE) Dorothy's first and second eggs (the two in the middle) were quite different in size. They weren't laid the same day. IRL they were much closer in color than the photo shows. There are only two new birds laying that I know of and they're the EEs. The BOs, Australorps and Wyandotte all lay various shades of beige or tan eggs. New Sophia is the one I'm sure laid two eggs yesterday. I didn't take any pictures of that. She's the one who lays the tiny blue-green eggs, like the one to the far left in my photo. There were two of those yesterday, one olive egg and several tan eggs. There were no eggs at all when we let them out of the coop, so I know none were laid from the night before. Since there are only two EEs laying and their eggs are quite different in color from each other, I think she had to have laid both of the blue-green eggs. Unless one of the two remaining EEs started laying, but they're both at least 2 months younger than Dorothy and New Sophia. Those two just started laying a couple of weeks ago. Could the younger ones be starting to lay already, even though they're so much younger?
I hope that made more sense!
Oh gotcha! I've had it happen and hesitated to mention it because I figured people would poo-poo the idea as impossible but when I mentioned it on here several people said new layers will sometimes do that. In my case, I also knew it was the same bird because I only have one Cuckoo Marans and her eggs are quite distinct from the others. The first time she did it, she laid 4 eggs in one day
They were all hard-shelled too. Needless to say she didn't lay at all the next day or two. It was several weeks later that she did it again and that time she laid two eggs in one day. In both instances I knew they hadn't been left from the day before because on the day she laid four, there was another new one there every time I went out to look that day!
Well, we have decided not to keep Tory. Long story short, the stress of dealing with her was worse than the stress of worrying about the chickens. The first couple of weeks she was doing fine but this last week she really started to roam and it was stressing out DH and therefore causing tension between us. Although the neighbors have so far been nice about it, he is acutely aware that we are new to the neighborhood and he doesn't want rifts with the neighbors before we even get started here. Already I have roosters crowing and guineas, so a wandering dog might be more than they can take. Also, she started to run out to the fence and squeeze under whenever a jogger or bicyclist would go by and ignored my command to stop. I understand LGD's are free spirits but they are still dogs at the end of the day and in my mind, they can't call the shots - they have to accept me as pack leader, just like my other dogs do. Tory will come when called - if she feels like it. If she doesn't, she'll just look over at me and continue on her way. And if there were a jogger, bicyclist or someone walking another dog, forget it. I've had to run out and apologize profusely more than once and while everyone has been understanding so far, quite honestly, I wouldn't be that happy if I were the recipient of a huge dog running at me barking while I jogged past so I wouldn't blame someone one bit for getting upset enough to report it. We've spent days discussing various options, and I've talked to my neighbor from two doors down about installing do-it-yourself electric fencing. He did his own and rigged up a neat way to do it, borrowing a relatives tractor and hooking up a hook upside down so it dug a little farrow when it was pulled. He even got the wire to feed down through the hook and directly into the ground and then his wife walked along behind pushing the dirt back down with her foot. So I was going to ask him to help me do the same at my place. However even he said the ground is just too hard now and we should wait until Fall so in some ways it felt like I got a free pass to wait a few months (although his isn't the only place she roams). Although that also means 2-3 more months of daily stress over wondering where she is at any given time. I had previously asked my neighbor if I couldn't just install it above ground but he said he wouldn't recommend it because it would be too easy to take it out with a mower or weeds or even weather, and then the system wouldn't work at all until repaired.
However even to install it myself, buying the system online and paying him to help me install it was going to end up costing several hundred dollars so I had to sit down and give it more thought. I have a small flock of poultry, and to protect them I adopted a large dog who is going to need care and feeding the rest of her life, only now, in order to keep the dog home where she can actually DO her job, I have to spend hundreds to keep her in. And it hit me that although I value my flock, that was going overboard.
The other piece of it is that I'm not sure how good a LGD she is going to turn out to be anyway. It is to the point now that she will disappear in the morning to go and play with above-mentioned neighbor's dog and be gone (if we don't go and get her) for hours. They are far enough up the road that if something were going on down at our place, she would never know it. When she comes home, she sleeps for the day (which is fine - I get that they are nocturnal dogs) but this dog sleeps far more soundly than most people. I've walked over her, opened and closed the house door or car doors loudly right next to her and its not that she's just deciding these are sounds she doesn't need to react to - she is so sound asleep she never even hears us. When Trish came to visit the other day, my other dog ran out and barked and sounded the alert that someone was here - I don't think Tory ever knew Trish was here even though we walked down to the coop a couple of times and stood in the driveway talking - only feet from where Tory was asleep under the front porch - before she left. And, although she did find the possum the other night, when a stray cat ventured onto the property, Tory never saw it. I had to lead her to within 20' of it and once she saw it she chased it off but it made me wonder how effective she would be at chasing off a daytime predator, like my fox that attacked at 5:30 in the afternoon - a time when Tory is typically still sound asleep. I'm not that concerned about nocturnal predators as my coop would really be pretty tough for something to break into.
So what we have decided to do is to go back to the two dogs we already had, except we are now putting them in the chicken yard to sleep at night. We're going to even move our Dogloo into the chicken yard so they'll have a way to get out of the weather and a place to sleep in the winter. And, if we're going to be gone for a few hours, we can put them in there then too. I trust both of them completely around the chickens. They've slept there the past two nights and even though the chicken door is open by the time I go to let them out in the morning, none of the birds seems worried about the dogs. I am hopeful that their presence will keep any nocturnal predators from even thinking about climbing into the yard. I'm also going to hope that the 5:30pm fox was an anomaly and that future attacks will not happen during the day (although like I said, I'm not sure Tory would notice if she was here
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