The Crows Are Stealing Eggs from My Chicken Coop
Ξ September 28th, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ The World Of Tom |
The chicken coop is being raided
I’ve talked before about how I’ve got a chicken coop and some chickens. I absolutely love keeping chickens, I adore eggs and I love chickens.
And my kids love chickens as well. Some time ago we borrowed an incubator and hatched 20 eggs. It was wonderful. You actually got to watch through the glass on the top of the incubator to see each of the chicks breaking its way out of the egg.
Some of them really struggled and some of them didn’t make it at all. However I was reading a book about keeping chickens and it said that if you are incubating chickens don’t help the young chicks get out of the eggs. Some of them will struggle to get out and some of them might make it but if you help the ones that won’t make it they will probably die anyway.
They are too weak to survive.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. What I wanted to talk about today was how crows are taking the eggs from my chicken coop.
Last summer we seemed to have a lot of crows around. Certainly a lot more than normal. In fact there was anything up to 6 or 8 crows in the trees around our house.
I didn’t think too much about it until I started to find that when I went out in the evening to the chicken coop there were no eggs to collect. It seemed very strange that my chooks had stopped laying because it was summer time and they generally lay right through summer time.
The only explanation I could think of was that I wasn’t giving them enough calcium in their food so they stopped laying their eggs.
But I eventually worked out that crows were landing on the ground and walking right into the chicken coop and taking the eggs. I couldn’t work out how they do it until we actually saw one caught carrying an egg in its beak.
Since then we have had a constant battle with the crows to stop them stealing the eggs from the chicken coop. Luckily however it seems to have stopped. About a month ago I started getting eggs again.
I suppose the crow that was taking our eggs has gone on holidays. There are plenty of crows around still, however they are not taking our eggs. All I can think is that one of them was taking the eggs and that one is gone.
If so I’m certainly hoping that the crow that was taking the eggs has left for good and won’t be back and our eggs and chicken coop are safe.