Broody Happens

It's just best to not fight nature.

We have one Java hen who routinely jumps the fence and forages all over the place.

Every. Single. Day.

If she doesn't jump the fence - which is rare - it might just be weather related. We could have tried to keep her penned up, but it doesn't do any good.

Over the past few days I have been observing her and I started to get the idea that she just might be broody. Well, yesterday I wanted to get her egg and get her back to the others. So I did what I needed to do which is get too close to her nest. She jumped out and got all agitated. She was running outside with all her feathers ruffled and puffed up. However, the attitude adjustment came when she realized that she would be heading back and getting some scratch with the other hens. She's not so dumb.

This morning, I went out to take care of the girls and released them from the coop and after they settled down I started to count the hens, just to make sure that they all made it in last night. First I started by counting the Javas. It's not hard to count them as they are black and white instead of black like the Jerseys and the Australorps. I kept coming up with five hens...there should be six. After looking in the coop, like one would still be in there, I realized that the daily escapee was out all night. My hope was that she made her way to the garage before we closed it up for the night - she did. Tom mentioned that he didn't see her earlier as she was totally hunkered down. Plus we don't expect to see her in the garage that early.

Okay...Now what?

We don't have a rooster so there is no opportunity to have her hatch out chicken eggs, BUT we do have ducks - 3 hens and a Drake. A few months ago, I thought that maybe if we had a broody hen that we should pop a couple of duck eggs under them and let them hatch out ducklings. It doesn't seem likely that one of the ducks will go broody. Plus we wouldn't even know what that looks like. After a brief discussion, Tom agreed and went it to retrieve a couple of eggs from the house, those being the freshest ones from this weekend actually.

Mind you I have never done anything like this. When I was growing up, the hens just collected up the eggs that they wanted without any help from me or my mom. So I went in with the two eggs and placed them right next to her and as I was violating her space she squawked and pecked at me, as expected. After a few seconds she evaluated the situation she took the eggs and slipped them under her warm little body and hunkered right down.

Good girl!

We call her Betty - Broody Betty

The average time period to hatch chicken eggs is 21 days. Hopefully our hen doesn't have an internal clock that tells her to get off her nest at 21 days as it take 28 days for ducks. I suspect she'll stay on the nest until something happens. She does look happy now. Also, I have gotten close to her to place some food and water next to her nest and she didn't get all crazy. Tomorrow we'll add a couple of extra eggs just to make sure that she has some success.

We tried breaking broody hens last year and it was hard to capture them to confine them. Plus I just felt bad for them. They were just trying to do what comes natural. May as well go with nature.

Farm life is the best life with broody hens!