True Story! With my first flock (in a different state), I had 8 hens, 0 Roos, and four of my hens (cuckoo Marans, silkie and silver Sebright bantam) always had at least one of my nesting boxes at 'no vacancy' at any given day of the week with their little broody backsides
...thank god for my four Golden Comet egg machines or we would have had to BUY our eggs from the Winn Dixie
.Now, with my current flock of 24 hens plus 4 roosters (one of which is my lone silkie of the entire flock which is how I landed on this thread
)...I have only had ONE girl, a Salmon Favorelle, who ATTEMPTED to go broody in the past three years, in fact, just recently. That ended up being a colossal failure through no intervention of my own...there is a pack of chocolate orpingtons who cozied up to my Top Dog Roo, a huge Production Blue (huge compared to the Polish, Appenzeller Spitzhauben and Silkie Roos)...and declared themselves the Nesting Box Home Girls. They hang out in the run all day and monitor the nine nesting boxes (nine identical boxes, yet only three boxes determined as suitable for egg laying...i.e....the three that are already occupied...changes daily)...and they bawk buh bawk at whomever snuck into a box before them for 10-20 minutes, and if that hen doesn't vacate the box, they shove their big, fluffy chocolate butts right into that box, turn around and back dat fluffy @$$ up until the poor hen squawks and drops out. Lots of bawk buh bawking going on. Then it's musical nesting boxes as more girls (and Roos) come in to watch or participate or just try to lay a damn egg. So yeah...no broodiness happening here, and definitely no chick hatching. But hey, $5/dozen unwashed nest to carton...the three of us can't eat six dozen eggs per week
