Someone is hiding eggs in the nest....

[chickensbythesea]

I've got an egg-hiding pullet at the moment, and here's what I've come to decide:

-it's in the single digits here, and we've found a few cracked eggs from the cold, but none of the buried ones have split.
-my main suspect is sort of broody. She tried very hard to have a private nest in the brush pile, but now that she's got to share a nest, she'll only sit for a few days at a go; she gets ticked when you take her eggs though, and she's crafty, so I'd guess she's trying to keep them from me.

If I let her do her own thing, they'd be both concealed and insulated in leaves. I imagine their instinct is the same for cold AND egg predators, so it's hard to say without knowing your bird and her temperament.

FWIW, my girl's from hatchery bloodlines, (but born on a nearby farm) and she is DETERMINED to hatch something. Her sisters are ambivalent, but she's like a machine.

 

[tigerrrrrrrlilly]

I have a little OEGB hen that I have had for over 2 years. She always hides her eggs from me, if I find them and take them she hides more somewhere else. If I leave them be (or she puts them where I can't get to them like underneath the barn!), she eventually sits on them and hatches them. She also often takes in other hens' eggs and will hatch them too. She even makes a good surrogate and has raised some of my other breeds' babies. She just likes to save them up until she has a good size pile. She says why sit for a month for just a few chicks when I can hatch 20?!!

lol She doesn't even care about the weather conditions! I've been dealing with it for over a year now-crazy chicken.

I also have a duck that has started to bury the eggs in a mound of straw and moves to different places hoping I won't pick them up, maybe she learned it from my hen.

She will sit on them too if I don't take them. I was selling ducklings in december because she had a hidden nest!