Red - a good test for point of lay is to cradle a bird under your arm with it facing behind you. You can then feel just above the vent (where the egg emerges from) - there should be two knuckle like bones. if you can fit two fingers between the bones, then the hen should be at POL - if the gap is too narrow, then so is the egg passage.red wrote:my girls were sold as POL - 18 weeks old.. however, I'm not sure they how accurate this is... the buff leghorn looks young to me, the cream legbar older.. we have had them two weeks... so still early days yet.
I also light my hen house during the winter. If your's were to come into lay, I would be tempted to put a low energy light bulb on a 24 hour timer in the henhouse. Set it so the hens get 15 hours of daylight and 9 hours of darkness. I set a reminder to adjust the timer at the beginning of each month to suit the reducing/increasing day length. I am not sure if you could induce laying on a later POL bird by lighting the house after the day length reduces past 15 hours though.
This time last year I had 32 Black Rocks, none of which were laying (one batch just approaching POL and another had been rescued from an organic farm that felt the birds were not productive enough). They were hoovering up a 20kg bag of feed every 2 or three days. Cost a bloody fortune to feed them from October to March and not a single egg to sell to cover the costs. Get a light in!
