Found mama on clutch of eggs

elane7

In the Brooder
Sep 18, 2021
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1
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I have a hen that I thought got picked off by something because we didn’t see her for nearly a week to 10 days. We finally found her on the property laying on a clutch of eggs. We have never let our chickens hatch eggs as this is only about a year into us having chickens. I went to collect the eggs not realizing how long she’d been on them, candled a few and they are well developed. I put them back under her but my worry is survival. It’s dropping down into the low teens here now. Sometimes single digit numbers at night. Should I bring mama and eggs in, wait until they hatch or just leave them alone? I don’t want any chicks suffering and we have the ability to bring her in with them but I know they can warm the chicks. I’m obviously not experienced with hatching. I just want them to be okay
 
Congratulations! That is actually so exciting and I'm glad your hen is okay!

I will defer to others with more experience, but ultimately you are going to have to trust your gut and do what feels right for you and your situation. If you have or have access to an incubator, many folks I'm sure would try to fire that up and move the eggs into it to control and monitor the hatch (indoors). But by no means do you *have* to do that. Also a viable solution of you have (or can build / set up) a big enough brooder is to bring her in along with the eggs and let her hatch them out in a little protection. Or some people have a big enough coop, they can section off a brooding area for mama within the coop.

When you say, on the property, is there any shelter? Can you provide her a dog kennel or something at least to nest in? I'm assuming there is already some kind of predator protection in place? Because another option of course is, "do nothing." But this obviously leaves the greatest risk both for the mother and the clutch. On the one hand, it can come down to risk tolerance.

If it is too cold and she abandons the nest, are you okay with that? Alternatively a mother hen can freeze to death if she refuses to leave her clutch. Not to sound alarming, and not saying that would happen in this case necessarily. I am assuming in even the lowest intervention tack, there still needs to be some monitoring so it doesn't come to that. I don't know how cold-hardy a breed your chicken may be.

So maybe that's one way to approach it. You might ask yourself, "If I were to do nothing, she's just out there nesting, and it actually became DIRE, what would I do?" If the answer is, grab my chicken and toss her in the dang coop already! Then I would see about getting your hands on an incubator, because obviously you will lose the clutch if you had to just break her abruptly. Me personally, if she seems to be doing a good job, I might try to find a way to bring her into a brooder type situation with the nest and see how it goes, while firing up an incubator as backup. They are not that complicated. You just add water so it doesn't dry out, and of course the eggs stay warm in there and keep developing. The rest is details if you come to it, like maybe trying to figure out when to stop turning since you don't know the exact hatch day, right?

Whatever you decide to do, it'll be a learning experience, that's for sure!
 

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