I've noticed a problem with my backyard chickens of late in that I've been getting fewer and fewer eggs until for the last few days I've gotten no eggs at all. Sick birds? They seem healthy enough. Egg thief? Not very likely as chickens lay in the daytime and my privacy fences are quite tall. No,this has happened before and like before I suspected they had decided to lay somewhere other than where we agreed they would lay their eggs.
You see, it only takes one young hen to set a bad example and break the contract and over time the others all start breaking the contract as well. Because not every hen lays every day you might not always notice but over time yield goes down until eventually the entire flock is laying somewhere other than where you want them to lay.
So this morning I set out to find where my flock was laying their eggs and in just a few minutes I found a huge pile of eggs under a storage building... where I will never be able to get them out without breaking them. Well, I guess I could move the building but there's not that many eggs to make it worth the effort. So I simply closed up all the openings under the building so that no chickens can get under it, sat down in a chair and watched.
Hen after hen after hen spent hours trying to figure out how to get back under the building. One might think they would go right back to their previous nest but they seemed to have forgotten that nest ever existed. Soon they would give up and go find yet another place to lay their eggs so I remembered a trick I learned from my grandmother, went inside and came back out with an egg from the 'fridge. Then I made sure all the hens saw me place the egg in the proper nest. Minutes later they were pushing at each other to get in the nest and lay their eggs with the egg I had placed in the nest.
That got me to thinking: what if bird-brained politicians brains think the same way. What if, instead of begging, asking and hoping our elected leaders will do what our neighborhoods need we just did it and deducted the cost from our taxes? For example: if traffic is driving dangerously fast down your neighborhood streets then just get together with your neighbors, order some speed-bumps online and install them yourselves. All you need is a sledgehammer. Want a neighborhood garden? Don't ask the City. Just dig up that abandoned or otherwise unused City owned lot down the street. A series of steel posts and signs driven in the ground along the side of the road will keep the city mowing crews out.
Too much crime in your neighborhood. Maybe your neighborhood association should hire private police, split the bill evenly between the homeowners and have everyone deduct their part from their property taxes. Will the City force the issue? Of course they will and that's when you and your neighbors hit the City with a class action law suit-- you know, so they know where they should be laying your eggs.
Will this work? Will this teach the City of Greensboro to place our eggs in our nest instead of someone else's nest? That I can't say but it's something we haven't tried and nothing else has worked to date. Besides, it works on my chickens every time and they're bird brains too.
