Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Our eggs are a little bit low in numbers at the moment although this is entirely normal for this time of year. Our diary back on 20th September discussed how all poultry needs a certain amount of daylight hours (usually quoted as a minimum of 14) to lay their eggs. As we move into the autumn and winter, the number of daylight hours decreases, and this causes some chickens to stop laying altogether. Another reason why egg laying stops or decreases is that this is also the time of year when poultry begin to moult: shedding their old feathers and growing new ones to keep them warm in the winter. As mentioned back on 6th September, we have a fair few birds moulting just now and at times when we look out onto the paddocks and see all the feathers everywhere, we have to remind ourselves of this fact and not panic that we have had a fox visit!!
The chicken in the first photo is our Leghorn/Sussex cross (see 24th July): she is NOT moulting as she was only born in the spring and so has in fact spent the summer getting her first set of true feathers. She is rather a splendid looking bird and has begun to lay in the last week or so which is great. Not so great is the fact she has chosen the rabbit hutches to do so in, but then she is following in the footsteps of so many chickens before her... we are quite used to cleaning out the hutches each day and finding a chicken or two inside. Her very first egg was quite small, her egg yesterday quite large and thin shelled - all entirely normal when a chicken first begins to lay.
NOT quite so normal was the discovery that this large, thin-shelled egg however, contained THREE yolks!! Two yolks again is normal at the start of a chicken's laying life but we have NEVER had three before! It is actually a 'fault' as it would not be possible for two or more chicks to grow and survive in one egg and so an egg with two or more yolks can never be incubated. 'Double/triple yolkers' as they are known happen because two/three ovulations occur at once and the eggs travel through the body together. As our hens get older and the laying routines more regular, this should no longer happen!
We are just getting one turkey egg a day now from our three girls. We thought Camilla may have stopped but yesterday after a break of eight days she produced one for us!! The four ducks are giving us just one a day now as well between them - we think Orange (in the picture) has definitely stopped but we are not sure... Muscovies lay around 70 eggs a year each. We have had 227 so far from our four although Apple did not arrive on our smallholding till the start of April, and did not start laying until the middle of that month (a good three weeks after the others). So 227 eggs from four ducks sounds quite good to us!!