Around here I like to call our chickens the Houdini’s because they are master escape artists.  They have a lovely (in my opinion) coop and a spacious run under an old oak tree – lots of shade and leaves to scratch through.  They are fed a good quality chicken food, have plenty of water, get scratch grain for fun and all of our kitchen scraps are sent their way.  Pretty nice life if I do say so myself.

They however, suffer from a bit of the wanderlust, and regularly escape from their habitat.  All of the time.  I’ll go out and they’ll obediently follow back home into their yard and then will be out again before I can close the front door.  Wire, netting, you name it – we can’t keep them in.  Hence, the name “Houdini’s”

We have 13 hens that have all reached laying age in the last month or so, but we were only getting a couple of eggs a day.  I refuse to buy eggs that aren’t from free-range chickens so it gets expensive to buy eggs.  Plus, I’m buying chicken feed and it only seems fair that I would get some eggs in return.  Right?

We knew they were laying somewhere, but couldn’t find the missing eggs.  We have almost two acres and a lot of it has been left in it’s wild, uncultivated state (tall grass, cedar trees and loads of spiky, thorny brushy stuff).  Habitat that’s perfect for chickens, but damn near impossible for humans to trek through.

Finally, my husband, who shall now be known as Sherlock, found the eggs!

We left a few of them there so the hens wouldn’t find a safer nesting spot and marked the ones we left with an “X” so we didn’t accidently crack a rotten one.

Mystery solved.  Now all we have to do is figure out how to keep them safely locked up!