every day is a good day
The day may have started with a dusting of frost on the solar panels, but the bright sun quickly melted the frost and made everything dazzle. King Richard struts his best when the sun sets his cape ablaze. He glows so brightly, few hens can resist him.
The sun is bringing the plums into bloom. Chickens love eating plum and cherry blossoms so much, I’m surprised they don’t hop into the trees to eat them. Fortunately, they wait for them to fall before they gorge on them.
If there is one thing chickens worship, it is the sun. It is what they live for … and after many days of rain, the sun is out today, filling them with great joy. Chickens love the sun so much, that the cruelest thing you can do to a chicken, is lock them up in houses where they never see their sun god.
Watch chicken society closely, and you quickly realize that the sun god rules their lives. It’s whom the roosters are trying to wake up when they start crowing before dawn. It’s whom the roosters are cheering on as they crow throughout the day. And when the sun starts to set, the roosters gather their hens back to the safety of their roosts, to spend the dark night while their sun god is away. Who knows, maybe the idea of religion started with chickens and their sun worship.
Every day is a good day, but that doesn’t mean that sad things don’t happen. And it’s sad when you find agencies like the American Egg Board making audacious claims which just aren’t true. For more than a month I’ve been trying to get the American Egg Board to send data to prove their claim that “Most eggs reach the grocery store just one day after being laid and nearly all of them reach the store within three days.” I have never found such fresh eggs in any store, have you?
The images below are from a handout I found on the American Egg Board website this morning in their handout titled “An Egg’s Journey – From the Farm to Your Table” in which they make an even more audacious claim that “Most eggs reach the supermarket just one day after being laid!”
To reinforce this claim, they ask a question about it at the end of the handout:
After reading that, I thought that maybe I wasn’t checking the right stores. So I called the local Costco this morning and asked them what packing dates were on their eggs. Costco moves a lot of eggs, so if any store in the area has fresh eggs, it must be them. A kind employee checked their pack of 5 dozen eggs and told me that the pack date was 028, which means the eggs were packed on January 28 because that is the 28th day of the year. Today being February 13, it means those eggs are at least 16 days old. Where are these one, two, and three day old eggs the American Egg Board keeps claiming are in most stores?
What is odd, is that after emailing the American Egg Board this morning about the handout, the link to the handout www.aeb.org/images/PDFs/Educators/AnEggsJourney.pdf is no longer in the Lesson Plans and Materials section of their website. Maybe things aren’t as sad as I thought.
Drama at the nests. Hanabi-hime is eyeing the nest Ruby is in, and Ruby is not happy. She is screeching at Hanabi-hime. “Don’t you dare!” she says. There are two empty nests next to the one Ruby is in, but Hinabi-hime wants THAT ONE.
Eventually Hanabi-hime gives up, and nestles into the next nest, but she’s not happy. Ruby finishes laying her egg, and jumps down. There are two eggs in the nest, but which one is hers? That’s easy to tell. It’s the warmest one as it’s the last egg out of a hen, but before I have time to take the eggs, Hanabi-hime nestles into the nest she wanted in the first place. The two fake eggs are there to let the hens know the nest is a safe place to lay eggs.
Later, when Hanabi-hime is done laying her egg, I have a chance to gather the eggs before the next drama starts.
Every day is a good day – it’s a saying I say over and over again. Around here, it’s also a Lucky day. Early this morning while bringing in some wood, I found Lucky sitting in one of the nesting boxes in the woodshed. She hopped out, leaving this warm, wonderful egg.
Later, while we were having lunch, she made us laugh when she decided that a curled up hose was a perfect place to take a nap.
