hattie stopped laying, always on nest?

[lilmagill]

hi! My young mutt who started laying a couple months ago has all of a sudden stopped (3-ish days?) and is constantly on the nest. She seems healthy, eyes open,. when I shoo her off (by merely petting her...She is quite skittish) she will scratch around for a while with the other girls but then when I turn my back she's back on the nest. I've read about broody hens, but do they stop laying? thank you for any information you can give me

 

[Ol Grey Mare]

She sounds broody and, yes, broody hens stop laying because they go into "hatch" mode. If she were setting *and* continued to lay she would be building her clutch ever bigger (to the point she may not be able to cover them) and would have a mess of eggs hatching at all different times---by not continuing to lay her chicks all start developing at the same time, hatch within a day or two of each other and then she can leave the nest and raise her brood.
Do you want to let her set and/or raise chicks?

 

[lilmagill]

thank you for your response. No rooster so I would like her to start laying again! What should I do? Shoo her off all the time?

 

[bobbi-j]

thank you for your response. No rooster so I would like her to start laying again! What should I do? Shoo her off all the time?

You can try that... my broody hen does not "shoo" off the nest. Last year she went broody late in the summer, and I didn't particularly want her to hatch, so I kept taking the eggs that she was setting on (her flock mates kept laying in the nest) and putting her outside. She'd go right back in. We played this game for the full 3 weeks she would have been sitting on eggs if I'd have let her and then she started laying sometime after that.

There are others on heer who will put their broodies in an elevated wire bottomed cage (like a large dog crate) to break them. Leave them in it (with food and water of course!) for a few days and it cools them down enough that they are no longer broody. If I had one of those, I'd have put my hen in it last year to break her faster.

 

[Larsonchick]

Do a google search for The Chicken Chick and how to handle a broody hen. She has tons of helpful advice.

 

[lilmagill]

thank you so much!