An Experiment in Broodiness

 

I knew that eventually I would want to breed some of my hens to hatch out some chicks. That was one of the reasons I decided to keep my two roosters. My plan (and I use that loosely) was to breed my Japanese Silkie and Polish chickens for selling as some folks around here like to show them at poultry shows and the local fairs.

(My Japanese Silkie Hen and Rooster, Mr. & Mrs. Cotton)

 

Also, it’s a sad fact that chickens do die often early, sometimes of unknown causes, and that each year as hens age, they slow down on their production of eggs. My chickens are now 2 years old, I’ve lost two, and since they began molting a couple months ago, their egg production has slowed down by more than 50%. Whereas I used to harvest a dozen eggs per day, I now only harvest 4-6 eggs per day.

So I knew that I wanted to always have a few young chickens added to my flock every year to replace the ones that either died, or that slowed down on egg-laying.

(My new handmade Nest Box that I won from Life on a Southern Farm is very popular with my hens, including this Japanese Silkie, Ameracauna, and Speckled Sussex. Check out the link for Hen Pals on my sidebar to get one, too. Your hens will thank you.)

I don’t ever want to have to buy store-bought eggs again. It’s true what they say about getting addicted to super fresh, farm eggs. As anyone who has had the privilege of eating farm-fresh eggs knows, you can never go back to eating store-bought again.

(This is the clutch of eggs that my broody Japanese Silkie hen has been laying on for almost a week now)

 

My Japanese Silkie Hen, Mrs. Cotton has been broody more times than I can count. She is now almost two years old and seems to believe that every egg laid in the nest box is her responsibility to watch over and keep warm so that she can be a stepmom one day.

 

In the past, I’ve just annoyed her over and over by removing her from the nest and harvesting her eggs until she finally gave up, or her broodiness ran it’s course. So, allowing her to go broody and hatch out some eggs is a new thing for me. I don’t want to bother with using an incubator. I’d rather let my hen do all the work. So I hope this broody experiment works!

(And Mrs. C should be a new Mother in approx. 15 days)

I’ve been doing some research, so I feel sort of prepared, but advice or tips from experienced chicken owners is also very welcome.

There was the issue of the other hens trying to lay their eggs in Mrs. C’s nest box and I was having trouble figuring out which eggs were growing into chicks and which eggs I could harvest. I solved that problem by marking the fertile eggs in Mrs. C’s clutch with an ‘F’. (F=fertile)

I think it’s funny that Mrs. C hasn’t even noticed the letters on her eggs. Maybe I should have drawn little faces or something instead?

I did have to convince Mrs. Cotton to leave the nest while I drew graffiti on her eggs. I told her to go stretch her legs and wings, and go eat and drink.

One of the things on her agenda was a little spa treatment dust bath.

 

She didn’t get much privacy, though.

 

 So, she figured she might as well head back to the henhouse to keep her eggs warm.

 

 

In the end, I decided that I should move her to a more private location and set her up in a temporary nest box. The other hens kept trying to squeeze into the original nest box and I worried that the eggs that Mrs. C is laying on would get trampled on and break, and that the chicks, once hatched, might even be attacked by a jealous hen.

(Stay away from my oval babies!)

    

I didn’t want to disrupt Mrs. C too much, so I brought out a separate, private condo for her instead of removing her from the hen house.

I set everything up for her, cut a nest box from a cardboard box, fluffed up the nest bedding, tucked her eggs inside and then picked her up and placed her within her new condo. She immediately checked out her eggs and crawled in her new cozy nest box to keep them warm. I added a waterer and a food dish a little bit later, so she won’t have to travel far to eat or drink or wait for me to let her out.

She is seriously broody, I tell ya!

 

With a Polish Roo and a Japanese Silky Roo, and a variety of hens (I believe the eggs in the nest box are from Ameracauna -lays green eggs-, and the other eggs could be Barred Rock, Rhode Island Red, Silver-laced Wyandotte, or Speckled Sussex) it will be very interesting to see what kind of backyard breeder designer chickens might be produced from this crazy experiment.

Anyone want to help me come up with some unique designer breed chicken names?

From the Tower of,