Chickens

‘Tis the Season to Be Broody…Apparently

I’m convinced that broodiness is contagious.

I knew it was bound to happen. I’d have a broody hen eventually. I didn’t expect to have 8 of them compete for the cutest chick/best momma hen within the same 3 month period. But here we are…killing it.

It started back in April when Dottie, one of our Silver Spangled Hamburgs, went missing. I thought maybe she’d been claimed by a hungry predator in the woods (gee, that sounds so ominous), but she kept showing up every few days to eat and drink. She looked ragged and frazzled and would run away as quickly as possible, so I figured she was sitting on a clutch of eggs somewhere.

I was right.

She was found in early May under our wood pile sitting on 16 (SIXTEEN!!!) eggs. We made her as safe as we could and waited it out. She had a 50% success rate and took care of her 8 babies dutifully. At the same time, Glenise, one of our Silver Polish hens, stopped showing up at bed time. We’d find her out in the barn, sitting on top of a stack of hay bales. Unfortunately, she kept knocking her eggs off said hay bale stack so she didn’t have anything on which to brood.

Once I figured out what was up with Glenise, I decided to move her to a safer spot than the barn and give her some eggs from other hens to work with. We used our at-the-time-vacant chick brooder and a portable nesting box, and she took to it quickly. Four of her five eggs hatched out to lovely barnyard mix chicks. (The daddy of both Dottie and Glenise’s babies is a beautiful Welsummer rooster.)

Having two hens go broody was fun and gave me the opportunity to learn so much, including being able to recognize much more quickly when two of my other hens went broody. This time, it was Lucy and Maggie, a couple of my Whiting True Green hens. I gave them five eggs between them to sit on. These ladies went broody in their nesting boxes so it was easier to tend to them. I decided to mark the eggs I was leaving for them and collect the new eggs daily. My other laying hens were still using these nesting boxes while Lucy and Maggie did their thing, and I didn’t want to lose track of which eggs were being incubated and which were new.

I only gave them five eggs because I really didn’t know if they’d stick out with the process of hatching these chicks in the busy environment of the coop’s nesting box. I didn’t want to waste a bunch of eggs on a little experiment – my ladies work hard for those eggs! When I saw that they were committed and it was time for me to order my meat bird chicks, I decided to add a few Welsummer chicks to my order. I only ordered 4, thinking I’d place two each under both Lucy and Maggie. They’d arrive around the same time the eggs were to hatch.

Great plan, right? The thing is, though, when my chicks arrived, they didn’t send me 4 Welsummer chicks, they sent 5 plus another free mystery chick. So now I had three chicks to place under each of my momma hens. Of their five eggs that they were working on, one chick didn’t make it and one egg apparently wasn’t fertilized. This is how chicken math happens – 5 eggs lead to 9 chicks.

At the same time Lucy and Maggie are being delightful mommas, Mary, our Black Cochin hen, and Ebony, one of our mystery chickens (I ordered Barred Rocks and received something else – maybe Black Jersey Giants, maybe Andalusian) decided it was their turn. So I, ever the doula helping mommas bring new life into the world, decided to mark another dozen eggs and let them sit on them. They should be hatching around the 21st of this month.

If you’re keeping track of my chicken math so far, you’ll only count six broody hens, so why did I say eight? Because I have two missing hens who I can hear but can’t find. I’m convinced they’re sitting on their clutches somewhere in the woods. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Honestly, if we didn’t have roosters, I’d probably try to break my hens of their broody behavior. No fun to sit on eggs for three weeks without the reward of motherhood, right? I’ve made the conscious decision to enable these mommas do what their God-given instinct is telling them to do, and I have no regrets in doing so. Which leads me to the question: who wants some chickens?

~Louise