Had chickens before, but still a NEWBIE!!

[AthenasOwl]

I had chickens growing up (meat cornish cross) but I never did the hatching, until having my own home. My chickens turned a year at the end of April. We have Buff Orpingtons and Easter Eggers..I am learning as I go, and I am realizing that there is a technique for hatching out the eggs. I have had a few things happen, that I am not too sure of WHY it happened, but want to try to prevent it from a repeat. The list goes as follows:

1. I have noticed that when a brooding hen gets up there will be another that lays another egg where she is at...I lose track of what is good and what isn't and end up having multiple ages when the chicks hatch..this isn't good because the first ones may peck the babies as they are hatching. How do you deal with making sure they are ALL at one age, and not having one hatch every other day?

2. Currently, I have 4 brooding hens, but 2 of them have pecked the babies hard. I have came on dead chicks because of this and I am nervous about leaving the eggs with them for fear they will kill them. How do you deal with the broody hens that are not Mom material?

3. The most troubling thing that has happened has been a chick hatched with an umbilical hernia, that we culled..does anyone know why that happened? The second chick was that it looked like it had pulled the intestines out when it hatched..was it because it may have been too dry and was sticking to the membrane?

Opinions on what I can and can't do better? I have looked at some of the threads and have learned a lot..like, for instance, that I don't know much about hatching out chicks...but, I don't know where to find the answers to these questions, and as I am looking at a lot of chicks hatching right now, I am needing guidance!

Thank you, for any help!
Colette

 

[Lady of McCamley]

Hi Colette,

I can make some recommendations for you that will help with your situation in hatching with brooding hens.

First, it is an unusual flock that can communal brood without the issues that you speak of. Some prefer to keep the flock together for ease of later integration, and have come to accept these issues and ultimate losses, but you can improve hatching by choosing over time only those hens who communal brood well together (which takes a lot of time) or by isolating your broodies from the main flock so they can hatch in peace.

As you've noted, many hens simply do not do well left to brood in the main flock. They can become quite aggressive, trampling eggs or other chicks, or if she is not an assertive hen can get pushed off the nest. This will cause her to set up camp somewhere else with another hodge podge set of eggs.

Those of us who repeatedly brood with hens generally find creating a separate brooding area a good idea. A number of us create a hutch system with removable and adaptable dividers that adapts to the number of clutches and pattern of grow outs. It doesn't have to be expensive or fancy. I used 2 large commercial size wooden packing crates set on an old grape arbor, some spare plywood, and chicken fencing to carve an area in a corner of my backyard.

As to the staggering hatches, a brooding hen wants to devote her energies to hatching the chicks in the eggs, and resents any interruption of that. She also will continue to pull in eggs indiscriminately if allowed to do so. It is best to set all eggs at once to avoid a staggered hatched. If you do not separate the hen from the flock, you then need to mark the set eggs so that you can daily pull out those laid later. However, this does continuously interrupt the hen and create a lot of handling of the eggs, which can cause further issues especially during lock down (see below).

You have already witnessed what happens when you have staggered hatches; it will confuse the hen and typically ends in a poor mother.
With eggs set at different times, the hen either ignores (or even sees as a threat) the chicks that have hatched to continue to tend to the unhatched chicks calling to her from the eggs - or - she gets up with the first hatched chicks abandoning the developed eggs. To avoid this, it is imperative that all eggs are set at the same time so that they will hatch over the normal day or two hatching time table. The hen naturally sets the first 2 days of hatching, then will get up with the chicks as she no longer hears any viable ones in the shells, abandoning those who are dead or undeveloped.

To transition from natural staggering to your next question of omphalitis or unclosed navals, you need to understand a bit of the hatching process. As the chick enters the final stages, the umbilical cord is drawn into its abdomen along with the remaining yolk sac. This yolk sac acts as nourishment those first 2 days after hatch (allowing for all chicks to hatch over a 2 day natural stagger). After 2 days, the chick needs food and water, and the mother gets up with them to show them how to scratch, drink, and be chickens.

In those last stages, if the humidity changes, as can happen with over handling of the eggs or disruption of the hen on the nest, it can cause a drying situation where the umbilical cord does not pull in quite as it should. Also simple genetic defects can prevent this stage occurring as it should. This will create the protruded umbilical cord that you see and a condition called omphalitis which is squishy chick syndrome. Usually unsanitary conditions will cause bacteria to grow in the unclosed naval typically causing the squishy appearance of the abdomen with chick fatality within hours of hatch. In industrial hatching, strict management of sanitation and humidity is used to prevent this occurrence, in brooding hatching, sanitation is limited to barnyard conditions. Keeping the nest area clean with unsoiled litter is helpful, and that can be accomplished by placing the food and water such that the hen as to step away, at least a few steps, to eat and drink as she will then poo as well. Avoiding interruption for her on the nest those last few days of lock down is important, which again leads to isolation of the brooding hen.

I hope that helps. There are several great brooding threads here on BYC where you can glean a lot of good information.

LofMc

 

[AthenasOwl]

LofMC

That actually helped A LOT!!! Thank you for that information...I have been looking at the other threads and learning, but the questions that I needed to ask I needed to know "now" Thanks for answering them. It explains a lot about what I was seeing.

As we have only done this a year, we thought we would only need a 'shack' for the chickens and that the flock as a whole would just be 'together'...I am learning about how wrong that thinking was. Both my husband and myself have learned a lot. Right now we have the 2 hens and chicks in our walk in shower..It is tight, but is workable. We have a tub next to it, that I have been turning on for humidity. We have plans on building a real chicken house with a brooder room apart from the general flock, complete with a covered small run. We also want to put a smaller room with just the food and other items we use for them.

This has been a learning experience for us...but it does take time to learn, I just don't want to lose more than I should be, because of my actions.

Again, Thank you!
Colette