@CCCL Momma & chick are too beautiful for words & I am so grateful you have posted their lovely pics here but unfortunately I have been traumatised & need to vent for just a moment.
You see yesterday was weird. The weather was all over the place & the girls broke up into 3 groups to shelter from the worst of it. I was feeling rather off colour & not up to checking on them as regularly as I usually do so it was lock up time before I realised I had someone missing!
It is so unusual I thought I had miscounted. Easy enough to do & hard to know which girl it was when with their backs turned it could have been any one of 1/2 a dozen but eventually I narrowed it down to Ceres. Ceres is one of my little Jap bantams & a new layer. I nursed her through fowl pox inside for over a month & the thought of something having happened to her was devastating!
I scoured the yard again & again. There was no pile of feathers so I
she hadn't been predated. Plus none of my girls seemed traumatised.
I searched for over an hour till it was pitch black then concluded that as unlikely as it might seem she had gone broody on me, secreted a pile of eggs somewhere & decided to sit.
This morning I called her before I had to leave for the doctors [he's cutting more bits out of me
] & made sure there was food & water somewhere she would find it if she left the nest. As soon as we got home I rushed to check. It looked like the food had been disturbed which was sooo reassuring & I recommenced looking! Experience told me she was probably hidden quite close to the coop & how I hadn't stepped on her last night I'll never know. I passed her several times & never saw her. She was on the downside of the hill under a tangle of long grass in a beautiful little nest, all snug & comfy.
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She was not best pleased to be disturbed!
And she was covering 6 eggs, naughty girl!
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