Getting a Pullet Surprise

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Look at the size of this chicken egg!
(A normal L size egg is on its right.)

I hard boiled it and what did I get?
A pullet surprise!

The veteran moshavnik in our village grocery explained that this abnormality can happen when a pullet (a young hen) is still a bit confused about this egg laying business.

Or, as Wikipedia explains it in big words, "Double-yolk eggs occur when ovulation occurs too rapidly, or when one yolk becomes joined with another yolk. These eggs may be the result of a young hen's reproductive cycle not yet being synchronized."

Once every household in this moshav ( [former] collective agricultural settlement) was required by the State to have a big hen house for egg production, like the one shown above.
Recently times have changed and this is no longer the case.
When I moved to this village in 2006 about a dozen were still functioning (albeit with foreign workers, not Israelis, doing the work).
Now there are just a handful of loolim, chicken runs.

And the ridiculous thing is that Tnuva Food Industries now has to import eggs from Turkey and other countries.
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(This post, worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, is for Camera-Critters.)
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Heat loss

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Instead of showing the usual JHDP's cute cats, today I give you our hard reality for Camera-Critters Sunday.

Israel in summer means hot, sunny, and no rain.
But this summer has been abnormally hot.
And this last week has been brutally hot.
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The farm animals are suffering just like the rest of us.
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A report in Ynet (Yediot Aharonot) explains that the extreme heat makes it hard for cows to conceive and this lowers their milk production. By over 20%, in fact!

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The cows get misted with water and have fans blowing on them, but still, as one dairy farmer says, "It's like going around in a leather jacket in the heat of summer."

A million chickens died on the first day of the unprecedented heat wave alone, last Sunday.

Poor chickens.

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Even if the farmers spray the roofs and try to cool the coops, the water runs in above-ground pipes and comes in hot, even the chickens' drinking water.

(Even my water comes boiling into my cold water tap now in my hot little house. )

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Exacerbating the problem is the reduced water allotment that the government gives the farmers. Israel has been in drought for years and we are running out of water.

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The current heatwave is also ripening many fruits before their time.

Like peaches, plums, nectarines, grapes, watermelons.

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Also, there are not enough foreign workers (mainly Thais) to pick the fruit.

Imagine working in the field in the sun or in a hothouse the whole day.

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Sadly, thousands of tons of fruit are being tossed, wasted.

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Let's hope it will cool down soon, in Israel and in all the affected countries.

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Ain't nobody here but us chickens

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ABC Wednesday starts again today with letter A.
And strangely enough, what came to mind was one of the first jokes I remember my grandmother telling me as a kid in Chicago.
"Ain't nobody here but us chickens!" is the punchline of the old joke.
It is the answer the farmer hears when he hears a commotion in the chicken coop one night and calls, "Who's in there?!"

Apparently it became a song as well. You can hear all the lyrics sung by a crowd of Muppets in this funny video.

My moshav (a collective agricultural village) in the Jerusalem Hills is on all the sides of a hill, on terraces. Agriculture is impossible. So in the old days the government told the moshavniks in the mountains that they must raise laying hens. Every household had to build and tend a large henhouse, in Hebrew, a lool.
Now the moshavim, like the kibbutzim, are largely privatized. But we still have about fifteen big chicken coops, loolim, in operation. Always big fresh eggs at the little grocery store.
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Home in the Jerusalem Hills

Every week more and more bloggers are contributing a look at their world on That's My World Tuesday. Come join us!
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Welcome to my village in the Jerusalem Hills (also known as the Hills of Judea).
We are just west of Jerusalem.
Perched on a hill, our altitude is plus and minus 600 meters, depending on which terrace you live.
The moshav (meaning collective agricultural village) was founded in 1950 by Jews from Kurdistan (Iraq). Soon new immigrants from Morocco also came.
It was a hard life for them, starting from nothing.

Today there are 234 households with about 620 souls.

I myself am a newcomer to this region of Israel, having formerly lived by the coast. Unlike the members of the moshav, I do not own a house. Instead I rent a simple one-room-plus-kitchen house with a big yard from the days of the founders.

From the next mountain across the valley you can see the sun set on our lovely hilltop.

Because the region is so hilly, no big-scale crop growing is possible.
 In recent years the moshav has moved away from collectivism and gone toward privatism, but once every member family was required to have a chicken house for egg production.

Today only less than a dozen hen houses still have chickens.
 Many others have been converted into warehouses, workshops, and even housing for low-budget renters.

Not much traffic on our narrow winding road.
One bus line takes me to Jerusalem, running once every few hours.

It is a nice quiet life, with nice neighbors.
 At night you hear only the chorus of the jackals, even right under my window.

I am blessed to have the best of both worlds--living in the country with woods all around us and yet being half an hour's bus ride from Jerusalem, the center of the world!
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Nightlife

"Nightlife" in our moshav. :) No "city lights" for us in this secluded rural village in the Jerusalem Hills. The only big, brightly lit buildings at night are the chicken houses. Cackle cackle!
Fine with me! And the glowing cat seems content as well.