Eggs

This is so exciting!  Our cute little birds are starting to lay eggs for us.

Yvon found this in their cage yesterday.

I don't know who's hand that is, so it might be misleading, but it isn't as small as I expected the first egg to be. The chickens start with half-formed or tiny eggs for the first few days and then settle into a standard size.  The standard for each breed we've got varies.

Here is a normal egg for us (in my hands), compared to the quail egg. 

We're going to fry the tiny thing this afternoon to see how it tastes.  We're too impatient to wait for there to be 5 or 10 of them.

We've had a bit of drama with the quails, but I think it's settled out to be three hens and one rooster.  The other definite and sex-crazed rooster was first pecked by the hens, isolated to heal and then escaped somehow.  Being a Japanese variety and cold-hardy, there's a chance he might survive in our climate.  I hold on to that hope.  If his behaviour didn't change, his lifespan with the hens was limited anyway.  I cling to the hope that he is flying freely somewhere and finding enough food.

The chickens have increased production again after a slow winter with little light, so maybe we'll start getting enough eggs to stop buying them.