1 Broody....2 Broody....3 Broody....and more!

Robert G

Songster
5 Years
Jan 23, 2018
420
631
217
South Texas
So I have 5 broody hens that all went broody around the same time! 1 of them is the mom hen and the other 4 are her daughters from November's hatch. They are due to hatch chicks this weekend, however, each time they get up to eat and drink they get into different nests from where they started. I candled the eggs this past weekend while all of them decided to go dust themselves, eat, and drink, and found most of the eggs were clear and could see and feel the liquid moving inside of them. Out of 17 of them, 10 were discarded. My aunt said that the spring/summer heat (90 to 100 degrees daily) spoiled their eggs, and its not a good time for them to hatch chicks. I was wondering if all the shuffling between the hens jumping into different nests each time they got up could also ruin the eggs due to different body temps? It would be horrible if none of them hatched any chicks. I should have asked for advice earlier and maybe build small coops to separate them. Any thoughts? I know it's kind of late now.
 
I’m having the same problem! My Cochin keeps switching nest. I tried clearing out the other nesting boxes but she will aboandon her nest to go sit on the one egg another chicken just layed.....
I’m interested to see what advice other people give you so I can use it as well lol. :p
 
I’m having the same problem! My Cochin keeps switching nest. I tried clearing out the other nesting boxes but she will aboandon her nest to go sit on the one egg another chicken just layed.....
I’m interested to see what advice other people give you so I can use it as well lol. :p

Mine happen to be all Black Cochins! Forgot to mention they are Bantams.
 
Our first attempt to let a broody hen do her thing au-natural was a miserable failure. Miss Broody started with 10 eggs, which blossomed to 18 (because she was camped in the "popular" nesting box - #1.) We culled back to 10, but then found her in nesting box #3 sitting on a clutch of new eggs, completely ignoring the ones she had been incubating for over a week. We relocated her. She, or one of the RSLs, stepped on one of the eggs and broke it. One hatched but didn't survive the first night. All the other eggs failed.

One of our issues appears to be too much traffic in the nesting box area. The RSLs will wait until Miss Broody goes into the yard to take her morning constitutional, and they will rush into make a deposit in the "popular" box. Other hens will lay in boxes #3 and #4, and Miss Broody will park herself on the first clutch she sees. Chickens - one step up from "fencepost" on the intelligence scale ...

Our second broody - Kelly (her eggs have green dots) - was relocated to "the Downtown Apartment." That's a private nesting box in the tractor located in the garden, away from the main coop. Kelly only has to contend with the roving gang of juvenile delinquents (aka the Wyandotte teenagers.) We are hoping that the reduced iterference from the rest of the flock will give her the ability to properly incubate her clutch.

Miss Broody is still in broody-mode, and will park on any freshly laid eggs available. We might move her to the adjacent Downtown Apartment and split Kelly's clutch between the two. Kelly doesn't seem to consistently cover the 9 eggs she has, and Miss Broody seems determined to mother some chicks.
 
That's about the same traffic I have. Other hens lay in their boxes while to get up. So all that traffic probably spoiled the eggs. I'm so scared to find that none of the eggs hatch for all 5 of them. Hate to put them through another 21 days. Maybe need to separate them while they are broody?
 
Well, that didn't work. Kelly was off the clutch when my son came home from school this afternoon. He said the eggs weren't warm, so she had been roaming around for a while. Miss Broody was out in the run, behaving very not-broody-anymore.

So we snatched the eggs Kelly had been sitting on for the last week and put them in an ad-hoc cardboard box brooder in the basement. We candled them, and they appear to all be in-process, so hopefully they survived the neglect. Temperature in the box is at 98F and slowly climbing.
 
So we are back to "no broodies" again. Kelly showed no sign of going back to the clutch (in spite of the Downtown Apartment being pretty much an ideal location.) She seemed more interested in antagonizing the roving band of juvenile delinquents. We put her back in the community area. She made a big fuss, and re-established her place in the pecking order.

The eggs were retrieved and placed under a heat lamp as a short-term emergency action. The following day I purchased a water heater thermostat and cobbled together the Cardboard Box Incubator of Field Expediency. We candled the eggs this morning (Day 9) and saw embryo movement on 7 of 8. The last one might have a blood ring, but we're going to give it the benefit of the doubt. In true Monty Python fashion, "we're not dead yet."
IMGA0768.JPG IMGA0769.JPG
 
Well today was the day, 21 for my 5 broody hens. Yesterday when I checked on them, I didn't hear any chirping so was thinking the worse. Today I was getting ready to find out if the last 7 eggs were doomed, and when I walked into the coop 4 of them had chicks sitting in front of them. All 4 hatched their last viable egg(s). The 5th one unfortunately didn't. Her only egg had spoiled. I did find 2 eggs that the other hens laid in their nests while they would get up and eat and I candled them. Sure enough they were fertile and with veins. So I took her spoiled egg and gave her those 2. Hope she hatches them.
 

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