A Tale of Two Chickens

A couple of days ago, when it was sunny, I went out into the garden about five o'clock to have a nice cup of tea and a bit of a sit down as they say. I was enjoying the colours of the garden, the sky was a deep blue with white cotton wool clouds. the new leaves on the trees were very green, as was the lawn and this was also spotted with the bright yellow colour of dandelions (the presence of dandelions is less annoying to me since I discovered they are good for bees), when something white caught my eye. Towards the edge of the lawn, under the apple tree, was an egg:

Strange, I thought, who would leave an egg there? I ruled out human intervention, many of my neighbours have their idiosyncracies shall we say? but  it was most unlikely that they had started flitting round the neighbourhood secretly giving away eggs. Amelia, the chicken lays in the nest box, generally the first box from the end, Bertie has never laid, which left Mary the new chicken, who is only 18 weeks old and not supposed to lay for another three weeks also she is supposed to lay blue eggs. On examination, the egg, as if washed in Daz had a sort of bluey whiteness to it, so I suppose that taken by surprise by her first egg, she had laid it where she happened to be at the time.
We lavished praise on Mary and Bertie sulked.

 Bertie did not take to the new chickens very well, there was a bit of pecking and bossing on the first few days but since she realised that they were not going away (at least Mary wasn't, Katie sadly disappeared into the mouth of the fox) she has been sulking, being the last one out of the house on a morning and first one in at night and standing around a lot looking morngy. Then like a teenager, jealous of a younger sibling, she decided to run away. When I went to shut the chicken house up that night, I did a quick check to make sure they were all there and discovered Bertie was missing. I immediately thought she'd been got at by the fox as she would not stay out of the house  later than the others and in any case was nowhere to be seen. 
I was hampered a bit here as Rosie was out and it was Oliver's bedtime and he was tired and cross. I could not leave him, to do a thorough search and he did not have the energy to come with me. I settled him down and set out in the dusk to do a lightning quick tour of the garden, the bit of the valley immediately behind the garden and the neighbour's garden.  The neighbour's chickens had also put themselves to bed but had not yet been shut up for the night, I did a quick check in their house and did see a chicken that looked like Bertie. On the other hand there were another six chickens in there and I could imagine the commotion if I falsely accused one of them of being Bertie. I went away and hoped for the best, which is what happened, as in the morning, my neighbour reported her surprise at gaining an extra chicken overnight.
Since then, Bertie has not slept away from home again nor has Mary laid any more eggs. At least I haven't found any, although I am now having to patrol the garden checking all likely spots.
Finally my sister said she had been worrying about Una the quail, so here is the latest picture:

As you see she is still very small, but she is on her feet and moving (hence the blurriness of the photo). She seems to be a fighter, I think she's going to make it.