Moving a nest?

Dingo

Songster
9 Years
Apr 29, 2010
715
15
133
Somewhere near Springfield, Ma
I went up to talk to the woman I got my eggs from today and she told me she found a dead chick in her pen this morning. She had all of the hens in the pen with the rooster because, despite my telling her they were probly fertile and developing, she didn't think they'd hatch. So now she has her hens in a seperate part of their pen but she could only locate 12 of the 13. So while I was there we wandered through their maze of trails in the tall brush and came upon the 13th on a nest. So her one roo on a nest became two roos on two nests. The one we found today cannot stay in that pen if his chicks are to survive so we're planning on moving him this Sunday. My question for you is will he realize his nest has been moved with him and set them in a different spot? they are fertile and I could feel half of them rocking, one was infertile and smelled horrible so we removed it.
I've drawn a little picture of how her set up is and would like to know where you would put him?

emupen.jpg

The pen marked #1 is where the hens are, the orange dots indicate where the roosters have their nests. and the curvey lines are the gates. The line across the bottom by the gate to the #1 pen is an error.
Could we put the rooster in (#3 pen) with the other one thats on eggs? #2 pen is very over grown but I'm going to have at it with a machete so thats a possibility.
 
I've not had this problem yet, but here's my thought. If there is no way to move all the girls to pen 2 and leave him be, I would: mark all the eggs, then see if I could put one under the other male. If he takes it w/o problem I would slowly put remaining eggs under him. If you put the other male in with the sitting male he might run the other off the nest, or at least make it unpleasant to set. Now if you could move #1 male into the small space at the bottom of #2 area, and dig a shallow hole and put in the dud egg, you might get him thinking about setting again.... not sure. If all else fails........ how far from FL are you.... hehe, I have 2 bators running.
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the male that is alone in pen #3 is not a friendly bird and he's setting very tight, we walked over to see him and he acted like he was going to jump at us and show us who the emu boss was. so we dont really want to do anything with him. The other problem would be we dont really know how far into incubation either nest is, we know that the mean rooster in pen #3 is now hatching, but the other one we only found him yesterday so who knows.
If we can get the other rooster to get back on his nest in a different location we'll probly try having him adopt all of the chicks, should they hatch, and putting mr mean rooster back with the hens.
I was thinking about the small area at the bottom of #2 pen, it's secure enough to contain him but we'd probly have to put some wire on one of the gates to keep the chicks in. It's also over grown but it's not overly big so clearing it wouldn't be hard.
I'm in Mass so sending eggs that are at most maybe 15 days (they're rocking) away from hatching wouldn't be possible.
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