hello community!

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In the Brooder
6 Years
Nov 14, 2013
12
0
22
indianapolis
Hello Everyone my wife and I are brand new to raising chickens. we were very excited to welcome our three rhode reds a week ago and have been outside in the cold Indiana weather being entertained by their daily routines and quarks!! we live inside the city limits but have almost a half acre which includes their house in our 900 sq ft garden. very excited about beginning our new adventure just thought we would say hello. hopefully ill figure out how to post pics of our lovely ladies Amelia, Margaret and Dave! Yes Dave the hen its along story but always brings a smile to someones face and that to us is what its about them being happy and us too!
 
we have been getting an egg every other day for the week in which we have had the girls. all the eggs all look exactly the same so we cant tell if everyone is laying or if its just one. is there anyway to tell other than being around when it happens.??? any help Is much appreciated in advance!
 
some people use different colored lipstick on the chickens "egg exit" area, their eggs will have some of the color rub off on them, so you could match them up to a particuliar chicken Discard lipsticks after use
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Hi and :welcome

Haha, your hens sound great. Dave, very original. :p
Well, hens that are laying tend to have big red combs. When our older hens stopped laying their combs went kind of pink-ish.
But apart from that I've got no good advice. :lol:

Enjoy the site!
 
Welcome!
The lipstick idea is VERY good. Also a way to tell how well your hens are laying if you don't want to use the lipstick is to look at the bleaching of certain areas of the bird. The yellow in the yolk comes from the bird so certain areas go from yellow to white. The areas that bleach (in order) are the vent, eye ring, earlobe, beak, bottoms of feet, shanks of legs, and hocks. Also the vent on a laying hen will be large oval and moist. Keep in mind that is takes A LOT of eggs for the shanks and hocks to bleach. Of course you wont be able to tell which hen laid which egg, but it should help you know who is laying the most and who is "free loading".
 
thanks for the suggestions we got one with a small red spot on it today so hopefully it is a sign that one of them who wasn't laying is now. Not expecting too much seeing as how they just had the big move last week and are still settling in not to mention the fact that we are getting less than 10 hours of light a day. just thought it was weird that one would lay four in a week and the others laid none! We are getting ready for a pretty big storm here in Indianapolis today so we might have to cause them more stress and move them to our garage if the tornado watch turns to warning
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