We did a lot of celebrating in a socially distancing sense this weekend as Saturday was Liz’s birthday so she and Matt came for dinner. They returned again today for Easter dinner and were joined by our other social distancing collaborators, neighbors Den and Meg (So it was 6 of us and Watson and Romeo, who joined Cooper for bones and dog socializing). It was a weekend of food, chores, taking walks down the street, and lots of card games. We did find an Easter church service to stream on-line and listened to music.
Appropriately, our peahen layed an egg on Easter Sunday. She’d already laid two eggs last week.
I acquired peafowl when I brought back some fertile peacock eggs (I’d found them advertised on a Craigslist posting) in 2017 when Ann, I, Liz and Sam flew to North Carolina for a beach vacation weekend with her extended family.
Recommendation to readers: If you’re thinking about making a brief detour to pick up exotic fowl eggs on the way from the airport to a family beach vacation everyone will be a little happier if you discuss this with your spouse prior to the start of the journey….
But I and the eggs and the family survived the trip and one of my chicken hens successfully incubated and hatched the eggs resulting in peacocks at Mesa Farm.
Like a good bird, my peahen started laying eggs in April. Most wild and domestic birds will start laying eggs in the spring when increased day-length stimulates the females reproductive cycle. Chickens (unlike peafowl and most bird species who will only lay a “nest-full” of eggs) have been genetically selected to produce lots of eggs, even 300 or more annually, and most poultry farms keep around 14 hours of artificial light on them per day throughout the year so they stay in peak production. If left to natural lighting, they would lay eggs in the spring and summer and then generally reduce or stop production in late fall and winter when day-length decreases. There is an old farmer saying, “Even a crow will lay eggs in the spring.” More on this whole chicken/egg/peafowl hatching process another time.
I hope you had a meaningful, healthy, and safe Easter weekend. Stay dry, healthy, and quarantined if you can on Monday.
First photo: Best trail camera photo of the week: A very busy-looking Easter bunny?
Second photo:
Peafowl eggs. She just scatters them on the floor of the pen and will likely roll them together later before she starts incubating them. I put the tennis ball in the photo just to show you a size comparison.
