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I enjoyed hearing about your chickens. On the ‘roo subject, I could tell you some rooster stories: Brewster the Blue Rooster, Big Daddy, Freckles .....

At some point, while I get plenty of chicken ‘exposure’ & some eggs due to my SIL’s flock(s) next door, I intend to get my own chickens one of these days - I eat a lot of eggs and try to get ‘pastured’ eggs. I saw a “chicken tractor” in a video that I really like. We have foxes, coyotes, and hawks that all like a nice chicken dinner ... every night. if they could manage it. The ‘tractor’ will protect the chickens, but they can be moved around the fields to eat seeds, bugs, & add fertilizer to the ground. My niece (about 3 hours away) raises ‘meat’ chickens about once a year - I currently have several bags of chicken feet from this past summer’s pastured meat chickens - added to bone broth, they add a ton of collagen and gelatin. If it’s not something you do already, when you put your ‘roos in the pot, you could save the carcass and make bone broth from the bones & feet - it’s good stuff. If you have an Instant Pot, that makes it easy and only a couple of hours.

Chicken tractor (starts about 1:14 into video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDZYnnbPuYg&t=357s

Something I ran into not long ago that you might like to try: an egg pudding. No joke ... it is absolutely delicious, is high in protein, and you would never guess it’s made from hard boiled eggs. It uses 10 eggs at a time, so it’s great for when the hens are laying up a storm.

https://mariamindbodyhealth.com/hard-boiled-egg-pudding/

It looks like the picture, too .... delicious. If you don’t like chocolate, she has a French Toast flavor. That recipe is in one of her books, but I believe she’s got a video on it.

No “chicken/animal duty” this morning .... and of course, since I don’t have to do the chores, it’s well above freezing today, unlike the past weekend. Sigh. :-)

Thanks - we might try the egg pudding. In particular sometimes now it’s hard to get my Mom to eat well, but she snacks a lot and might like the egg based chocolate pudding.

My wife has been making egg salad and macaroni salad (with plenty of egg in it) quite a bit — potato salad is on the “to make” list tomorrow so long as I prepare the potatoes... ;-)

Mr. Amberlink is now in pieces in the freezer. (Wifey is a Filipina and cooks and eats chicken feet.)

Foxes are moderately sparse here, but we have many hawks, coyotes, raccoons, and even opossums will sometimes take down a hen. Plus neighbors’ dogs — in the last several years we’ve lost more chickens to neighbors’ dogs than anything else. That has not been a problem recently though. The one time a few months ago it might have - the new neighbors across the road dog got loose, I heard our flock squawking and ran out with my well scoped .22 pellet rifle. I yelled at the dog, it ran home, and the neighbors’ teenage kid concurrently saw the “rifle” in my hands — the dog hasn’t been loose again since.

A large dog trained to guard the chickens can help a LOT, but that’s not in the cards for us just now.

Gotta call it a night - busy day tomorrow.