Tag Archives: chickens

Opinions and Theories are Not the Same as Facts

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Please understand the differences in what you’re finding online.

It’s March 2025 and eggs — the kind that come out of chickens and are a staple in American breakfasts — are not only in short supply, but more expensive than ever. This is a fact that you can confirm for yourself by visiting any supermarket or grocery store that sells them.

Bird flu is spreading throughout the US. It has caused the death or destruction of millions of commercial egg farm hens. This is also a fact. Here are some recent trustworthy references to support this:

Hens
These were two of my hens, back when I kept chickens. I had as many as 18 at one time and was selling eggs to my neighbors for $4/dozen. I miss them but have trouble getting them cared for in the winter when I’m away.

Hens lay eggs. Fewer hens mean fewer eggs. This is a combination of fact and logic. As someone who has had a backyard flock of hens on and off for the past 30 years, I can assure you that the more hens I have in my flock, the more eggs I get.

The economic concept of supply and demand states that, well, you can read it for yourself in this quote from the Supply and Demand entry in Britannica Money:

supply and demand, in economics, [is the] relationship between the quantity of a commodity that producers wish to sell at various prices and the quantity that consumers wish to buy. It is the main model of price determination used in economic theory. The price of a commodity is determined by the interaction of supply and demand in a market. The resulting price is referred to as the equilibrium price and represents an agreement between producers and consumers of the good. In equilibrium the quantity of a good supplied by producers equals the quantity demanded by consumers.

I was a business major in college so I took Economics 101 and 102. I know this stuff. It makes sense to me. And if you think about it, it should make sense to you. Prices on items that are scarce but in demand are generally higher than the same item if it’s available in higher quantities. This can be a natural result of marketplace economics, as the above paragraph suggests, or it can be manipulated by sellers to either increase profits on scarce commodities or control the sale of them.

An example of using price to control sales is what I recently saw in a local supermarket that had some eggs available for sale. If you bought one or two dozen, they were about $7/dozen. But if you bought more than two dozen, the price went up to about $10/dozen. Hoarding has become a problem with the egg shortage and this supermarket was trying to discourage that behavior by jacking up the prices for hoarders.

That’s not to say that some producers, wholesalers, or retailers aren’t trying to cash in on the shortages. There will always be people and organizations that take advantage of a situation.

In the case of producers, I don’t blame them one bit. If you had a flock of a 10,000 chickens and lost 7,500 of them to bird flu — science says it’s 75% to 100% deadly to birds — you’d not only have to spend a boatload of cash to make sure your facility was free of the pathogens, but you’d have to buy 7,500 replacement birds. Commercial hens might be different, but I know I had to wait four to five months for any of the chicks I obtained to start laying in my backyard. That’s a huge cash outlay and reduced productivity for months. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to cash in on the eggs being laid by the 2,500 birds I have left. Supply and demand supports this, especially since the loss of hens is so widespread.

But this is still an opinion. You might think it’s fine for farmers to take a hit that might actually drive them out of business. That’s your opinion.

The farther you go up the chain from the producer with suddenly less product to sell, the less acceptable it is to cash in on the scarcity. But that’s still a moral judgement or opinion. It is not a fact.

And then there are the conspiracy theories. Big Henhouse is controlling the price of eggs and using bird flu as an excuse. There really isn’t a shortage at all. They’re just pretending it is to separate consumers from their money.

Is this a fact? No. Is it based on facts? Perhaps a few. Maybe egg prices are unreasonably high in an area that hasn’t been hit by bird flu. But maybe those producers are also sending their eggs out to areas that have been devastated by bird flu.

What is the truth? What are the facts? Are these Big Henhouse price gouging conspiracy theories what’s actually going on? Or are they just a tool to focus your hate and anger on big business?

If you’re actually trying to answer what I’ve posed as rhetorical questions, don’t just share the first Google hit that supports your view. Look at the source of the information. Far left? Far right? Anti-big business? Or a news outlet that tends to focus on fact-based reporting? Don’t respond to this post with something you read on the New Republic or in Mother Jones or in a blog post in a popular blog. That’s not news. It’s opinion and/or theory based on cherry-picked data.

I don’t know about you, but now that I’m not producing my own eggs and feeling forced to eat them every day just to keep up with production, a dozen lasts me more than a week. Yes, I’m one person and I understand that larger households probably eat more eggs. Although the prices will never get down to what they used to be — ever heard of inflation? — they should eventually come down as the bird flu problems are resolved and flocks are rebuilt. Until then, if you find them too expensive for your household, eat fewer eggs. You don’t need them for breakfast every morning. And you don’t need as many as you think you might.

Otherwise, just stop stressing over the price of eggs and worrying about who is profiting in the current situation. Despite what your super socialist friends might think, price fixing by the government is not a reasonable long term solution — especially with the current government. Buy only what you need to help prevent scarcity. If everyone did this — remember supply and demand? — the prices will likely come down sooner than later.

The Quiet Place

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Nothing is really as quiet as it seems.

“You live in a quiet place.”

Rooster
Future dinner guest of honor.

That’s the first thing the hispanic man said when he got out of his small four-door sedan in my driveway. He took a step back and opened the back door where his young son was sitting in a booster seat. He’d come to get the pair of two month old roosters I’d advertised on Craig’s List for free just the day before.

I was surprised by his observation. Most people commented on the view, which can be breathtaking if you’ve never seen it from my property’s perspective. I thought about his words and said, “Sometimes.”

We worked as a team to catch the two roosters, which were both white with gray patches on their backs. They’d been hatched by my broody hen who preferred sitting on eggs to laying them. Two months after playing mom to these boys and their four broodmates, she was sitting on eggs again and already had two chicks.

He put the two roosters in a small pet carrier just large enough for a 20-pound dog.

“There’s another one in there, but I’m not sure which one it is,” I told him.

“It’s the brown one,” he said. We walked back to the fenced in area and he pointed it out. I thought he might be right. I went in and caught it easily. He put it in the carrier with the other two.

“Are you going to eat them?” I asked.

“Yes. But I might wait a few weeks for the brown one. He’s small.” He showed the carrier’s cage door to his son, who had remained patiently in the car. “Pollo,” he said.

Then he put them in the trunk, shut the lid, and drove off.

I was glad he’d be eating them. Better that then setting them to fight.

– o –

Much later, after spending time at the local airport watching the rapelling crew practice and having lunch with a friend and looking at a trailer for sale and checking on an AirBnB house I manage I got back home. I listened to the radio as I did chores.

His observation came back to me a while later when I was out on the deck, fetching a bedspread I’d hung out over the rail out there.

Even though the radio was off — I’d grown tired of listening to voices talk about the same old thing — it wasn’t that quiet. Out in the distance, I could hear a dirt bike revving its engine as it sped around on a dirt track in someone’s back yard. I could hear a dog barking. I could hear a motor — maybe a lawn mower? — down in the valley below me. If I listened hard enough, I could hear the cars on the road across the river.

I put the bedspread in the dryer and turned it on, then went back outside to see what else I could hear. The dryer through the vent. Rover the cat’s nails as they dug into the 8-inch square posts holding up my deck roof while he climbs the twelve feet to my perch. A single cricket starting its night song early.

You live in a quiet place.

I wondered where he lived and how much louder it was. Did he live near an orchard where there was always the sound of sprayers or mowers or work crews pruning or picking or working on irrigation? Did he live near a major road where there was always the sound of traffic rushing by? Did he live in a densely packed neighborhood where you could always hear some man shouting, some woman yelling, some kid screaming, some dog barking, some car with a bad muffler growling?

I remembered what it was like in Manhattan, on the overnight stays on 57th Street near First Avenue where my college boyfriend’s parents lived. Fourteen floors up in a building with a doorman and a guy would would fetch your car from the garage when you called on the house phone. Out on the tiny balcony or inside with the windows open even a crack, the sound of the city was a constant quiet roar, punctuated with car horns and sirens. It was never quiet there, just as it was never dark.

Even here there were times when it wasn’t quiet at all. In the late winter and early spring, when the temperature dipped down to the low 30s, the wind machines — two bladed fans on tall poles — would come to life, spinning their blades on rotating heads that sounded just like helicopters coming and going over the orchards around them. Sometimes they’d start as early as 11 PM and run all night long, finally shutting down an hour or so after the sun finally began warming the air around them. But how often did that happen? Four or five times in a whole year?

The orchard sprayers were a different story. They ran almost daily, usually in the morning, sometimes starting before dawn. I’d wake at 4 and go out onto my deck and look out to see their headlights among the trees. Pesticides, herbicides, anti-fungal chemicals, and who knew what else? During the day I’d see the spray like a cloud around the sprayer as it moved through the orchard. The chemicals didn’t bother me; they never traveled far. But it was the sound — a steady whine — that you couldn’t avoid. Even that was seasonal, though, and when the trees were picked, the sprayers were mostly silent.

You live in a quiet place.

Back in the chicken yard, my remaining rooster, father of the three that had left in the car trunk, crowed. Another cricket took up the evening song. A larger, closer dog barked. My roof clicked as it always does when the sun sets and the metal panels start to contract in the cooling air. A train rumbled by two miles away and then tooted its horn at a distant crossing as I knew it would.

The dryer finished its short fluff cycle and the vent sound faded. Inside my laundry room, The Samsung dryer would play Bach in simple tones before shutting off.

Was this quiet? I guess that depended on what you knew. It was quieter than Manhattan, but it wasn’t nearly as quiet as the 40 acres I used to own with my wasband at the top of a mesa 30 miles south of the Grand Canyon. Five miles from pavement, it was so quiet that you could hear the sound of a raven’s wings flapping as it flew by. It was so quiet that one morning, when I tried to turn the radio down because it seemed so loud, I discovered that the volume level was already set to 1. That was a quiet place.

I turned and went inside to finish making the bed, leaving the door to the deck open so the sounds of this quiet place could come inside.

The Broody Hen

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I help a broody hen hatch 12 eggs.

Right around the time I returned from my vacation in early May, one of my hens got broody. A broody hen, in case you’re not familiar with the term, is one who wants to sit on eggs so they hatch and she can have chicks.

Although I’ve had chickens on and off for at least fifteen years, I’d never had a broody hen. The trouble with a broody hen is that she doesn’t lay eggs. She just sits on them. Worse yet, some of the other hens will lay eggs where she’s sitting so you don’t get eggs from those hens either. If you have chickens for eggs — which is why I have them — you don’t want a broody hen.

But I figured I’d let her sit until she got bored. She was sitting in the upper nest closest to the coop door and was in there every day that I peeked in to gather eggs.

And then one day, she was sitting on the nest farthest away from the coop door, leaving all her eggs — about ten of them — exposed and cold.

For some reason, I decided to take the eggs and stick them in my incubator. I set it up in the garage, added water to keep the humidity sensor happy, put a box of cat food cans on top to secure the lid, and forgot about it.

Until about four days later when she switched back to the first nest.

I gathered up the neglected eggs and added them to the incubator. At that point, I had 18 eggs in there.

Becoming a Chicken Mama

Life went on. She kept sitting on eggs in that first nest. I kept trying to pull the eggs out from under her, trying to discourage her from sitting.

And then one evening about 18 days after starting the incubator (according to the incubator’s clock), I went down to check the incubator and heard a chick. I saw the broken egg but didn’t see the chick right away. Turns out it had fallen off the platform where the eggs were in their turner and fell into a tiny crevice that normally would be full of water. Fortunately, I’d put water on one side only.

I had to take the incubator apart to get it out. Then I had to set up a warm place for it to brood. I had a chicken heater and a clear plastic bin and some pelleted litter material. Within minutes, I had a place set up on my dining table for the squawking little bird. Then I went back to the garage, put the incubator back together and put the eggs back.

Chick and Eggs
Here’s the first chick that hatched, along with two pipping eggs. Can you see the cracks? The black thing is a heater that won’t burn the birds (or anything else).

That’s when I noticed that three more eggs were pipping. That means they had tiny cracks caused by the chick trying to get out. I brought them upstairs and set them in the warm bin with the other chick, which had quieted down now that it was warm.

And then I thought about the work I’d made for myself: brooding another batch of chicks in my chicken coop. I had a brooding area in there that could comfortably hold 8 chicks for about a month. They had to be manually fed and given water daily. And then I had to shift them to a separate area in my chicken coop and yard so the larger birds wouldn’t kill them. I had just gone through this process with chicks I bought in March and those six birds were still separated. I was looking forward to having just one flock. These four (or more) chicks would make that tough.

But what about that broody hen? She seemed to want chicks. How about if I let her hatch one?

Worth a try, I figured. I grabbed one of the pipping eggs, took it out to the coop, and stuck it under the broody hen.

I went to bed. Around 1 AM, I was woken by squawking chicks. I got out of bed for a look. There were two more chicks with the first one. I went back to bed.

In the morning, there were three more hatched chicks in the incubator. I brought them upstairs and stuck them in the bin.

Outside in the coop, there was a fluffy yellow chick poking out from under the broody hen.

Hen with Chick
Here’s a happy mama with her first baby.

I called my friend Janet, who has experience with broody hens. I wanted to know if she thought I could stick the other chicks in with the first one. We decided on a plan of adding them one by one and keeping an eye on things. If the hen rejected the chicks, she’d kill them.

So, for the rest of the day, I worked in the garden near the chicken coop. Ever hour or so, I’d go upstairs, grab a chick, and bring it outside. I’d open the coop door, talk to the hen, pet her with my left hand, and drop the chick behind her with my right hand. I also prepped the adolescent chicken area, which was still occupied by six pullets, with a tighter screen that the tiny chicks would not get through. I even made a nest for the area and added chick food and a water bottle.

I tried getting the pullets in with the adult hens and roosters. That didn’t work out right so I herded them back into their area. I figured the mom would protect her chicks against them.

By around 3 PM, I went up for the last two chicks. More petting and dropping. The broody hen didn’t seem to mind. She’d bonded with all the chicks and they had bonded with her. They stayed together and when they got cold they snuggled up under her. It was painfully cute.

But they were in an upper nest and I wanted them in the other area. So I opened up that area and started grabbing chicks. The hen immediately started squawking, but I worked fast. In the end, I grabbed her and stuck her in there with the single egg she’d been sitting on. I closed up the area. As her chicks gathered around her and she made a spot in the makeshift nest to sit on the egg, they all calmed down.

Hen with Chicks
The hen and her chicks settled into the young chicken area of my coop.

Success!

I kept an eye on the situation, visiting regularly over the next few days. I was very surprised when they went outside just two days later. The young chickens didn’t bother them — but they also stayed far away. I think the broody hen read them the riot act while I wasn’t looking.

When I saw the chicks slip through the fence from the young chicken yard to the adult chicken yard, I nearly panicked. But the adult chickens didn’t bother them at all and they slipped right back to mama quickly.

More Chicks

Of course, my chicken hatching experience wasn’t over. There had been 18 eggs from at least two batches. There were 11 left.

Baby Chick
This was the first of the second batch of chicks to start hatching.

I checked the incubator after a day out running errands and was horrified to discover that one of the eggs had hatched and the chick had fallen into one of the water reservoirs. It was chirping away with just its head above water. In a panic, I gently lifted it out by its head and wrapped it in my shirt, then hustled upstairs to the bin, turned the heater back on, and put it inside.

Then I carried the incubator upstairs and put it on the table so I could keep an eye on it.

Later in the day, I tried introducing the new chick to the mama hen. She took one look at it and pecked it on the head. I snatched it out. Damn.

I had a little get together with friends that evening and they all commented on how cute the chick was. I explained my dilemma, which was worse than it had originally been: it looked as if I had to raise a single chick by itself.

Fortunately, my friend Alyse agreed to take it. She’d just ordered some chicks and already had some older ones. She felt confident that she could introduce it to her flock. I was thrilled. I put the chick in a yogurt container with a pierced lid and she took it home with her. The next day, she sent a photo of her significant other with the tiny chick and an older chicken sitting on his chest and belly.

Chicks
Three chicks fit comfortably in a one-quart yogurt container.

Unfortunately, three more chicks hatched the next day. Again, she agreed to take them. We met up in town and I handed off another yogurt container full of chicks.

I wasn’t done yet. The next day, another chicken hatched. (If you’re keeping count, this is number 12.) This time, I set up my camera atop the bin and videoed the last few minutes as the chick finally pushed out of the egg.


Watch that last chick hatch.

Later in the day, I met up with Alyse and handed over yet another yogurt container.

And that was it. No more pipping or hatching for the next two days. I disposed of the six remaining eggs.

Meanwhile, in the Chicken Yard

Meanwhile, I took away the divider between the chickens so all of them have access to the whole coop and both chicken yards. The mama and her babies mostly stay in that first yard where I have chick feed in the feeder. They camp out at night in a tucked away spot in the young chicken area. When the hen inexplicably got out with her chicks and Penny went after them, she charged Penny several times, successfully driving her back before I got them all back in the yard.

Chickens
The mother chicken and her babies. Note the young chickens to the left. They are mortally afraid of the big hen.

So I’ve got seven more chickens — for a total of 18 — and just have to hope the little ones turn out to be girls. One rooster is enough.