Holy cow - babies galore!! Advice needed!

[fshinggrl]

Where are the pictures???!!! Haha! Sweet story! What breed to you have?

 

[Gypsy07]

I just added up the numbers.... Your hen was sitting on 27 eggs! That's incredible...

My broody hatched eggs in a separate shed and I let them out when theyw ere about a week old. Mama hen marched them straight back into the main coop and brooded them in a nesting box at night until they were big enough to fly up onto the roosts. They got the odd peck from the other hens, mostly over food (the chick crumbs seem to be like 1,000 times tastier than the boring old layers pellets) but no real picking on or bullying. And my two roosters are much nicer to them than the hens are. If you watch them all carefully for a day or so, you should get a feel for how your other hens are going to react to them.

Lovely story. Please post up some pics of them all if you can...

 

[weeders n feeders]

All I can think of is the twist you've put on the phrase " don't count your chickens before they hatch". Isn't life fun you only wanted six hens but look what you have gotten.
And to top it all off she had to go broody as soon as she started laying. Did you even get any eggs for yourself first?

 

[SteveBaz]

Quote:
FUNNY in this case very funny

 

[EMaker]

Bring in the other eggs so Mama Hen can sit on them, too. She probably only left the eggs (and the weak chick) to forage because the other chicks needed food. Now she can relax and continue to set on the other eggs, since you're doing the feeding. Yes, the hen can eat Starter feed along with the chicks. What a GREAT story! Just curious, what breed of chicken is she? Post baby pics please!

 

[Sphinx]

What a cool story!

I also want to see pictures.

 

[chickenpredatorkiller]

lol that reminded me of a story I read a while ago about a hen named Hannah who ventured off to have chicks..... that was an AWESOME story.

 

[Patricia Jane]

What a wonderful story. Smiling as I'm writing this. There is no other love than watching mama and her babies. Thanks so much for sharing. Good luck and have a lot of fun.

 

[JenNY99]

Thanks everyone! They are Buff Orpingtons. Thanks for letting me know what mama can eat. Hopefully she'll continue to mother them as well as she has been doing! All chicks look healthy and lively except that 12th one that appears near death. Don't know that there's anything I can do to help the poor little bugger. All the other eggs have been checked - there were small fetuses in 2 of them, but very small - one was not much more then a dark smudge and one appears to have stopped developing probably 1 week ago.

Here's a dilemma - since we wanted just a few chickens for eggs for us and the dogs, we planned on around 8 chickens - so we built an 8'x10' coop - what the heck are we going to do in a few weeks? Will people buy chickens in the late fall? I guess I can cross that bridge when we come to it.

No, we got ZERO eggs from this hen before she went broody!! The other 5 are giving us 3 eggs a day, so I'm not too upset!

Here is mama sitting on her babies:

Here are the babies:

a close-up

And my boys who are THRILLED to have baby chicks back in the basement

 

[Gypsy07]

Quote:
You can fudge quite a lot on the minimum square foot space per bird if you're free ranging them, which I guess you must be. I have an 8x6 shed with roost bars round three walls, so 22' of roosting space, and right now I've got 19 adults and 3 chicks in it. They all bunch up together on the roosts so that less than two thirds of the roosting space is used. A while ago I had 26 birds in there, and they all got on fine. It just depends on your set-up. I have two 8x9 runs, one on each side of the shed, and two pop holes that are always open. I shut the door to the run each night, but leave the pop holes open so the birds can go in and out as soon as the sun comes up each day. I let them out to free range from abou 9-10am, and shut them in at night once they've all returned to the coop.

Anyway, minimum coop space per bird is 4 sq ft, so with an 8x10 coop, you could have 20 birds no problem!