We need some help to determine why Ella lays the way she does.
Chicken owners will be well aware of the factors that might affect their pets’ laying behaviours, whether that be the time of year, age of the hen, breed, deficiencies in their diet or worst of all, a disease or ailment. Usually it’s relatively easy to understand why a hen has stopped laying for a period if time, but we’re stumped with Ella.
To best understand our bemusement, take a look at the chart below:
Every coloured square indicates a day on which Ella laid an egg, the darker the colour the larger the egg.
Ignoring the single outlier on the 20th October last year, we think you’ll agree there is an astonishing regularity about when Ella starts and stops laying each year.
In 2014, her first year, her last egg was laid on the 8th August. Her final eggs in subsequent years were laid on 29th July and 18th July.
Even more consistent are the dates of her first eggs of each year; the 4th, 5th and 9th February.
We initially thought that her regularity was related to sunrise times or sunlight hours, but there doesn’t appear to be a correlation here. Sunrise times in Leighton Buzzard for the first and last egg laying dates vary from about 07:30 GMT at the beginning of February to about 04:30 GMT at the end of July. Similarly sunlight hours vary from around 12 hours to 16.5 hours. If either of these factors were to be the cause, we’d expect to see similar figures around the first and last egg dates.
There also appears to be no correlation with the weather. Temperature and rainfall measurements don’t suggest anything of interest.
So we’d like to open this up to our poultry friends – does anyone have any suggestion about why Ella lays with this regularity? Is it purely coincidental? She is a Columbine – are there any other Columbine (or other Cream Legbar derivative) owners who have seen this in their flock?
We look forward to to any and all ideas!
P.S. For those that are interested, you can view up-to-date statistics for Ella. Or you can see the mathemateggs data table.