So. We had a very staggered hatch. Short version was this was unplanned, we had 3 broodies, 1 quit, and we ended up incubating a bunch of random eggs.
So we now have 17 chicks ranging from 2 weeks to yesterday (and two more eggs unlikely to hatch).
The two most recent were actually taken from a broody last night - she was acting weird, we thought she was quitting on her eggs, we candled them. We first tried relocating her and her 6 eggs to a new place, but she hated that. So eventually we decided to incubate her two pipped eggs overnight.
Anyway. We still have 2 broodies. We don't know if they are good mammas. We did find a dead chick in one nestbox, but we don't know for sure what happened (this was over a week ago, and we took all her eggs since we were already incubating the abandoned ones.
My question is... Do you think we can give these chicks to the two Mamas? Are the older ones too old?
Also... They are currently broody in the main coop and would need to be relocated before we gave them chicks. But in relocating them, they might go wild again.
Any suggestions appreciated. We do have a section of the run separated with some makeshift nestboxes for the broodies, we just aren't sure how to correctly transfer and our first attempt backfired. We are equipped to raise these chicks ourselves but would greatly prefer the 2 mammas to
So we now have 17 chicks ranging from 2 weeks to yesterday (and two more eggs unlikely to hatch).
The two most recent were actually taken from a broody last night - she was acting weird, we thought she was quitting on her eggs, we candled them. We first tried relocating her and her 6 eggs to a new place, but she hated that. So eventually we decided to incubate her two pipped eggs overnight.
Anyway. We still have 2 broodies. We don't know if they are good mammas. We did find a dead chick in one nestbox, but we don't know for sure what happened (this was over a week ago, and we took all her eggs since we were already incubating the abandoned ones.
My question is... Do you think we can give these chicks to the two Mamas? Are the older ones too old?
Also... They are currently broody in the main coop and would need to be relocated before we gave them chicks. But in relocating them, they might go wild again.
Any suggestions appreciated. We do have a section of the run separated with some makeshift nestboxes for the broodies, we just aren't sure how to correctly transfer and our first attempt backfired. We are equipped to raise these chicks ourselves but would greatly prefer the 2 mammas to