Ag Experience Insider: The Life of Daily the Chicken

We have a chicken the kids have fondly named, Daily. A month or so into the summer, Daily started making her home on our deck. I try to drink my coffee out there most mornings, and this chicken would continually join me. She’d cluck around the deck for a while, hop on up, cluck around some more, get acquainted, and always ended up sitting on our deck couch as if she owned it.

Because we live on a ranch in the country, things get pretty beat up in the wind. Plus our dogs think anything that is ours is theirs. So a cover for our couch was essential. And we cover it when we aren’t using it. But that didn’t stop Daily.

We got home one day (let’s assume after softball), I watered flowers and took off the cover for the couch. That’s when I discovered a smashed egg all over one of the cushions. The only way that could have happened was if Daily snuck her way up and under the cover and laid her egg under there. And that’s exactly what she did because it happened every day a few days in a row. It seemed a little unlikely because chickens don’t break their eggs. Eventually, I realized that the only answer to that was that one of the dogs sat on top of the cover and smashed the egg below after Daily had laid her egg.

After this happened a few times, I was sick of spraying down cushions with half-baked eggs on them and decided to take the cover off of the couch. This would allow us to see if she laid an egg. Then we would grab it and avoid the mess.

Back to my morning coffee, one of my favorite parts of summer. Daily joined me and I started realizing she would lay her egg around 9:30-10:00 in the morning. We figured out her rhythm. She would be friendly, social, and snuggly before laying her egg, but the moment she laid it and we would grab it, she’d take off and wanted nothing to do with us. She just used us for our soft couch.

One morning I was out on the deck all alone, scrolling away on my phone, and noticed that it was probably close to time for Daily to lay her daily egg. I grabbed my phone and recorded for about 20 seconds. I remember thinking, why am I doing this? I’m not going to catch her laying an egg. Plus, that’s a little weird. And I figured she’d get camera shy or I just wouldn’t catch it. But I decided to try again. I recorded on my phone another 20 seconds or so and caught a video of her laying an egg. I had never actually seen it in person before. We’ve had chickens for 12 years, but they always lay tucked in a nesting box, not on my deck couch sitting next to me. It was a strange mix of pretty neat and a little gross. And my family and friends agreed. I sent the video to people I thought would find it interesting and eventually posted it on Facebook. And that was the consensus – neat, but also gross.

Since all this has happened, Daily has become broody. It seems like a couple of times a year a few of our hens go through a broody phase. This means she wants a clutch of eggs to sit on that will hatch. Since we don’t keep a rooster around, her eggs aren’t fertilized and we take them from the hens everyday. Sometimes we move broody hens to a different location to try to break them of the broody feeling. And we also make sure she has food and water because she will sit there sometimes weeks on end without getting up very often.

Things we’ve learned about chickens over the years