Naughty, Naughty Chickens!!

First off, a confession. When it comes to documenting life's adventures through photography, I completely suck. We've got a good enough digital camera, and it's perfectly easy to get the pics off the camera and into the computer... And yet, I *NEVER* seem to remember to grab the camera and take a picture when things happen that would be so much easier to relate with actual photographic proof that they occurred!! Now, when I had a camera phone, I did quite a bit better, with the exception that the pictures I did manage to take were of hideously low quality. But now that I'm on a crackberry that has no camera, I find myself, once again, after something happens, saying "D'oh! Why didn't I get a picture of that??"

Okay, now that my shortcomings have been aired, here's what happened this weekend.

When we bought our house, the previous owners had done a full remodel on it, and left evidence scattered around the property. One such piece of evidence is the old (and I do mean old!) kitchen sink, which had been propped up against the side of the garage ever since we moved in. Sure, we've said many times that we need to just go get rid of it, but it just hadn't happened yet... Until Saturday, when we finally said "enough's enough, and it's gotta go!" So we went over to that area next to the garage, where the kids park their bikes and discovered that there was more than just the sink - there was lots of remodel related junk there. So we got all the little pieces tossed into the back of the truck, and then went to move the monster iron sink.

(Time out for another quick update: Cindy's dad moved up here on Friday, and is staying primarily with us until we find him an apartment in Fircrest. I'll get another post up telling about that... maybe even with a picture... So he was outside with us when this story all took place. Thank you, we now resume the story of the naughty, naughty chickens.)

We went and got gloves on because the sink was big, heavy and filthy, and Cindy was quick to point out that it probably had spiders in it. Then we grabbed on and pulled it away from the house to start its journey to the dump. And we saw something that shocked us much more than spiders would have... We both utterred some sort of shocked exclamation, and called Dad over to see what we had discovered. As he made his way over to where we were, he said, "What is it? A Snake?? A Rat?? A Lizard??"

No.

Our naughty, naughty chickens had discovered that tucked underneath the sink was a great place to make their own nest to lay their eggs. There were FOURTEEN EGGS in the nest!! All three colours were there, meaning that all three of the hens had been using it... It was impossible to determine how long they'd been using that nest, but for the last several months, the egg production in the APPROVED nest has been very low. And I have caught the girls over in that section of the yard before, and shoo'd them back into the APPROVED poultry habitat. Now I know what they were doing back there.

We finished moving the extremely heavy sink into the truck, and buried the potentially rotten eggs deep in the ground I was digging up to become our vegetable garden. Then it hit me - WHY didn't we take a picture of the nest!!?? It was startlingly perfect, nice and round, old leaves shaped into a bowl, with more than a dozen brown, green and blue-green eggs laying in it. The eggs were even segregated by colour - brown down the middle, with the two shades of green on alternating ends. It looked like an Easter Basket! But since I didn't take a picture, I found a pic of a basket of eggs that at least match the colours of our surprise egg hunt.

So I put up a fence to block that part of the yard off, and though they COULD fly over it, I'm hoping it'll stop them. But I will be checking there for eggs the next time there aren't any in the approved egg location.

And I'll be sure to get pictures the next time something newsworthy takes place...