Just when we'd given up hope

... we finally got our first egg from our Andalusian hen! We've had her since February and were told she was already 16 weeks old. She has been threatened with being 'invited' for 'dinner' a few times but now she has laid her first creamy white egg we are happy we didn't put Lusia in the pot.

Unfortunately is is really dark today so the picture isn't very good but let me assure you the in real life the eggs are pinky beige (L), mid brown (B), pale blue (R) and creamy white (T).

Seth and Miho also had an Andalusian but she only laid a few times then carked it*. Hope we have better luck with our bird, because she is quite lovely looking and gotten very tame.

Our other chickens are all doing well, but we have a little silky/araucana cross (that lays blue eggs) who dearly would like to be a mama. She sometimes spends hours sitting on the nest trying to brood everyone else's eggs. Shame it wont ever happen because we don't have a rooster. If she doesn't get this idea out of her head soon I might need to go and buy some fertilised eggs so she can get the baby chicken making thing out of her system.

Definition: cark it
An Australian idiom said to have originated in or before the 1970's. To die, as in don’t tell the kids the budgie carked it. Perhaps it is a play on the standard English word croak ‘to die’, or it may be a shortening of carcass. Cark it also means ‘to fail or break down completely’: my blender’s carked it.