Broody or NOT??!!

[olgreenie]

OK...my chickens are a little over a year old now. I have a buff orpington that seems to be broody. I thought she was going to sit tight when i would catch her in the same box all puffed up for a few days straight. Then yesterday i went to water them and she was not in the box anymore. While i was down there she jumped up in another box that had a few eggs in it from the day. She immediately laid down on them. Is it possible for her to stop being broody? I am really hoping that she was going to hatch some on her own as I just had a bad hatch in an incubator. Can anyone relate to this?

 

[Ridgerunner]

It doesn’t matter what a hen does in the daytime. My key to tell whether or not a hen is broody is where she spends her nights. If a hen spends two consecutive nights on the nest instead of sleeping in her normal spot on the roost, I consider her safe to give eggs to. That’s two consecutive nights, not one night and not one night every now and then. It’s hard for me to imagine but I’ve had people on here not understand what two consecutive nights mean. That’s why I’m emphasizing it. It’s nothing to do with you.

Was another hen on her regular nest when she came back? What can happen is if her nest is occupied by another hen laying an egg she might get on another nest that has eggs when she returns from her daily constitutional. It doesn’t mean she stopped being broody, she just got confused and hopped on the wrong nest.

I’ve had that happen, not a whole lot but yeah it can happen. A couple of years ago a hen did that and probably spent most of the day on the wrong nest. When I found her the eggs were cold to the touch. I just put her back on the right nest and she hatched 11 out of 11. Her getting on the wrong nest is certainly not a good thing but it’s not always fatal to the eggs.

I’m retired so I can normally go down there a few times a day. On the rare occasions I see a hen on the wrong nest I just move her back where she needs to go. Often there is another hen on that nest laying an egg or a strange egg in that nest. You did mark the eggs you want her to have, didn’t you, so you can tell which ones belong?

Some people isolate a broody from the flock for this very reason. They build a predator-proof pen or put it in the coop so they can lock the broody hen in there and other hens out. They provide food, water, and enough room for her to come off the nest and poop. She doesn’t have a choice as to which nest to go to. The risk with this is that she might break from being broody if you try to move her. There are a lot of variations of how people do this but it’s normally best to move her at night.

Some people lock the hen in the nest until they can be around for a while, then let her out when they can come back and check on her a half hour or hour later to make sure everything I OK..

I don’t know why but some people have this problem a lot more often than others. Usually I don’t see this but you’ve had a warning. Your hen may be easy to confuse. I’d watch her.