Collected yesterday: what looks like a Jumbo egg that may or may not be frozen (the shell wasn't cracked, so it may be all right).

I'm currently in the process of tracking down more pullets so Bob can spread the love around, as it were. I could have some by around the middle of next week if things work out.

My daughter recovered a medium egg yesterday. According to some reading that I've done, new layers will do exactly what Mildred is doing - being erratic in the type of eggs produced, laying all sorts of sizes until settling in to consistency. Hence the extra large or jumbo double yolkers.

I've also seen some speculation on the Ross breed stating that they may not reproduce well, but based on the literature I downloaded from Aviagen, the Ross is supposed to be a competent breeder.

More observation and research. And the search for more hens continues.

Eggs and toast for dinner last night. Thanks, Mildred.

(Her big eggs were all double yolkers, btw)

Saturday at noon I went out to see if I could catch Mildred's egg before it froze. What I found were two small eggs - one the size of a deformed ping pong ball, the other like a misshapen pullet egg - by the door. Frozen, but not cracked. According to my wife these are soft shell eggs - Mildred is still getting used to laying eggs and came out with a couple of clunkers. I've been keeping oyster shell out so calcium shouldn't be a problem, but she still has amateur status, I guess.

This prompts the question - do hens sense when their eggs are bad or damaged? Outside of the frozen eggs (which cracked across the part resting in the straw as they froze and looked otherwise normal), every egg that was deformed or cracked I found by the door as if the chooks were rolling it out of the nest, trying to get rid of it. Maybe I'm anthropomorphising a bit too much here. I'll have to do some checking.

Sunday morning she was hiding in the next box, cooing. Bob came by and stood watch over her. No egg produced. I did go to my daughter's 4-H meeting and got a lead on a place that sells almost-ready-to-lay pullets. More investigation out that way to follow.

Over the last couple of weeks I've done some digging into the mystery that is the Ross Chicken, and I've started to find some results. I still don't know things like which breeds were involved in creation of the Ross strain, but I've found out some things that a semi-science geek like me would find fascinating.

It looks to me like Ross chickens were created by a company called Ross Breeders, which is a subsidiary of Aviagen. Yes, you guessed where they likely got their name - from Avian Genetics.

Aviagen/Ross has four types of chickens available to commercial breeders:

Ross Males are compatible with (excuse me, they're a complement for) the three strains of female. They're bred for both efficient meat production and, um, barnyard virility (I don't know - shades of Dr. Strangelove here).

Ross 308's are multi-purpose broilers designed to meet broad market requirements.

Ross 508's are designed for deboning and high yield of white meat.

Ross 708's are large birds for deboning and roasting - the objective here is high meat yield.

I've got to admit I find this whole thing of numbering the strains a little bit eerie - although it makes perfect sense. I've been seeing signs in corn fields for years that gave the strain number of what was growing there. I suppose I'm simply not used to seeing this done in the context of an animal.

Also, I don't know quite how this strain thing works when you start talking about one type of male and three strains of female. Are all males produced between a union of a Ross Male and an x08 female always a Ross male, or are they x08 Males? I'll have to check with my wife, the biology major.

Judging from the massive size of Mildred and especially Bob, I'd have to guess that they come from the 708 line of the family (unless, as I said, every male produced is simply a Ross Male). I base this on some of the breed specs given by Ross.

That's what I know so far. I registered with the Ross section of the Aviagen web site and found it quite useful - as I write this, I am printing out a Breeder Management Guide that I downloaded. If it yields any other clues, I'll report in.

And I'm still determined to find out what breeds were the ancestors of the Ross - no matter what their number is.

Because I'm not there to check for eggs at noon. I'd rig up a heat lamp but given my mechanical ineptitude, I'd probably end up burning the barn down (Which reminds me of the old chestnut, "Lightning struck the henhouse last night... and we had sudden fried chicken!").

My daughter has a 4-H meeting this weekend. Maybe I can get a lead on where to buy a couple more pullets to distract Bob from Mildred.

Mildred is apparently no longer stressed by her injuries. I found an egg in the nest box this morning while opening up the chicken coop. It was apparently produced yesterday because when I took off my glove to feel the temperature it was stone cold and cracked along its length from freezing. It was missed because I'm fighting a virus, so my daughter offered to shut the chickens up last night, and I had told her that Mildred wasn't laying. But considering the temperatures we've had here, it probably still would have been frozen by the time she was at the coop yesterday afternoon.

So Mildred took a week off and is now laying again. And backstory writing and Ross research continues.

My thinking now is that Mildred's egg production has ceased because of stress - she was wounded in the neck, is trying to deal with Bob's newfound affections, and is no doubt at the bottom of the two-chicken pecking order.

There's another factor now: Friday I discovered she'd been wounded again. The circumstances were the same as last time; Bob in the coop, Mildred in another part of the barn where she usually doesn't go. This wound is on her back near the base of where her right wing connects. It looks awful, but she seems to be doing okay. I put some Bag Balm on it Saturday, and she got through the weekend just fine.

Sunday morning she was growling oddly, like she had done when she laid the ill-fated egg on the woodpile. My wife speculated that perhaps she has hidden a nest away somewhere.

Now my plan is to get a couple more pullets as soon as possible to try and spread Bob's attention around a little bit more. I was going to do this anyway, have a mutt flock with some different breeds, but I was going to try and wait until spring. Not now. My daughter has a 4-H meeting coming up sometime soon. I hope I can get a lead on some decent layers who were hatched around Labor Day so they're roughly the same age as the Rosses.

I am also looking into getting more information on the Ross breed of chicken. Will report in here as soon as I find something.

No eggs for two days now. A little research tells me that chickens don't molt until around 18 months of age, so the feathers are probably a result of the clucks sorting out their pecking order. This would stress them some, which would also account for the lack of eggs. The weather could be a factor, too. I was surprised that Mildred was laying in this cold, but with temperatures dipping back down into the 20's and teens, she may have decided that enough was enough for a while.

And I must remember that Mildred is still an amateur at this.

The cold snap will continue through another week, so this might be a good time to start on the backstory of how I came into possession of Ross chickens and related hobby farming things. Look for episode one in a day or so.

No egg today. She's building slowly. Let the clucks out early because they're going to be closed up early tonight, and they need a chance to get out and do their chicken thing.

Also, the coop floor had feathers all over it when I looked in this morning. If they're going into their first molt, egg production could be off for the duration.

(They picked a fine time for it, if you ask me - more arctic weather supposedly on the way.)

Another egg this morning, smaller than before. This one was more toward the water station and the door. It was still warm, so it had been laid sometime before 7:15. There was also a dent in it that cracked the shell, so I set it aside for Cleo.

My next project is to find something bigger that Mildred can use as a nesting box. She's such a big hen that the recommended 12" by 12" by 12" box is too small for her. I've found that most of her eggs appear on the edge of the box, so I suspect today's was in a similar position and got kicked around before I arrived to grab it. Sounds like a lunch hour trip to WalMart is in my future.

Three pieces of good chicken news today. First, Mildred broke her pattern of laying two days and taking a day off. For the first time she has produced an egg three days in a row.

Second, she has apparently figured out the wisdom of laying eggs in the nest box inside the coop. I had a problem with frozen water this morning and instead of keeping the chooks penned up, I let them out so they could at least nibble on snow (I have seen them do this before, so count this as a chicken behavior) until I resolved the problem. I didn't think there was that much of a risk of her laying an egg elsewhere in the barnyard since her pattern indicated she wouldn't lay today. When I went to give them fresh water in the early afternoon, Bob was in the goat stall, but Mildred was in the coop, laying down and clucking loudly. That made me wonder. So I checked her favorite nest box and sure enough, there was an egg. I suspect she's learning to go to the coop now when the urge to lay hits her.*

Third, Mildred made a quantum leap when it came to egg size in the last few days. I mentioned you could put the eggs in chronological order simply by sizing them. Today's egg seemed huge by comparison. Tonight I took a store-bought large egg and put it in the carton to compare against Mildred's output of the last few days. Yesterday's egg was a large egg - the sizes were almost identical. The three earlier eggs were smaller. Off the top of my head I don't know if they would be considered small or mediums, so we'll say they were pullet eggs. Today's egg was much bigger than all of them. She's laying in Extra Large territory now.

Another couple like her and we'll be able to keep ourselves in eggs. I'm working on that part for spring.

*The box next to her favorite nest was one I tried to encourage her to use at first by putting a golf ball inside it. She does not use this one. It makes me wonder if she thinks that it is being used by another chicken.

One more egg today in the nesting box, laid sometime between about 8 a.m. and noon. This makes four in the fridge now, and when you look at them in the carton, you can put them in order of production just by arranging them by size.

If Mildred holds to her pattern, she won't lay tomorrow and will produce on Monday and Tuesday - two days of work, one day off. Nice job if you can get it. I don't know if this will last the winter, or if her laying will pick up as she gets used to this egg production thing. I'm surprised she's laying as much as she has since the high temperatures here have only been in the mid-twenties for the better part of a week now.

Last night when I went to lock the chooks up, Bob was waiting in the coop but Mildred was AWOL. I found her in another part of the barn with the goats, and she had some blood staining the feathers on part of her neck. This means one of three things happened:

1) She sustained the wound exploring a part of the barn she probably shouldn't have been in,

2) She was accidentally trod upon by one of the goats, or,

3) Bob was trying to mate with her and things got a little rough.

If I were a betting man, I'd put money on option 3. The times I've seen Bob try to practice the delicate art of fertilization, I decided that he and Mildred were like newlywed humans - they knew the basic mechanics of what should be happening, but were inexperienced in making their efforts effective.

Me, blogging about chicken sex. Who would have thought?

Since Mildred conveniently started laying around the first of the year, she made it easy to keep track. I bought a discounted calendar and started keeping track, beginning with the first discovery of an egg:

1/2/04 - 3 eggs found. (Mildred was standing on a sheltered pile of scrap wood I use for projects, cackling up a storm. Investigation showed she had laid an egg there, and it rolled off a piece of wood and broke in half. A sweep of the chicken coop found a nest she had made under what was supposed to be a roost, with two more eggs; one was the size and shape of a distorted ping-pong ball. The other was normally shaped. A small nesting box was then placed on the floor and Mildred was placed inside it. The eggs were opened and examined, then tossed out.)

1/3/04 - 1 egg. (The broken shell of an egg was found in the barnyard near the entrance of the goat stall. Decided to keep the chickens in the coop until mid-morning to early afternoon to encourage next box laying.)

1/4/04 - 1 egg. (In the nest box. Success!)

1/6/04 - 1 egg.

1/7/04 - 1 egg.

1/9/04 - 1 egg. (This one was inside the coop right next to the door and had a small, round crack in it. I opened it and gave it, sans shell, to Cleo - I don't want her learning how to open eggs. Let the chickens out early as a result.)

It looks to me like Mildred started laying as late as 12/31/03 at the tender age of four months. I wasn't expecting anything until March. Perhaps since Ross chickens are bred to grow to butchering size quickly (42 days), they also mature as layers faster. Also, the eggs being produced are brown, which supports a theory of my wife's that they are a cross between Rhode Island Reds and a large white breed like Plymouth Rocks.

My next project is to measure the lengths of the three eggs successfully collected so far. They're all medium looking in size, but it looks to me like they're getting larger as time goes on. Hmmm, wondering if I can get my hands on a small kitchen scale...

Everything is set up for the moment. Stand by for entries on egg production, notes on assorted barnyard projects and woes, observations on the behavior of Ross (and eventually other breeds of) chickens, plus occasional backstory to explain how I got here to begin with.