Some background: we had one of our smaller chickens get broody sometime in late Feb-early March. Since it was still pretty cold, my husband tried to keep her broody by replacing the eggs each day. It finally warmed up in mid-April and she was still sitting. We were gone for vacation for 10 days (4/9-4/19). She was still broody before we left, so we let her accumulate 10 eggs. We left for vacation and a neighbor watched our flock. The broody hen added another egg which our neighbor removed. After we returned, my husband built a shelter for the hen--by the way, a cuckoo maran bumped the original hen off the clutch of eggs and was the broody mama when we returned. She is still sitting on the eggs. We had to move her and the eggs from the old coop to her new protected location after we returned (4/19). Before we moved her, we noticed a broken egg in the next box where she was sitting and there was a little chick skeleton in the mix. All this to ask--how long do we let her go sitting? Our rooster is pretty manly so we think at least half of the eggs would have been fertilized. I would hate to remove her from the nest and then find out they were a day or 2 from hatching. Thanks for any information you can provide. IrishEyes45
