Hey everyone!
We're finally back to cuddling our girls again, after my daughter got sick last year and wasn't allowed to be near any animals (or hay/dirt/etc) for 9 months. Thankfully, other volunteers at the offsite place we keep our coops at took care of our birds.
Now that we're back at it, I have a bit of a dilemma. A week ago, I noticed one of our black leghorn girls (a tiny little bantam) seemed to be broody. She was sitting on 3 eggs - 1 of her own, and 2 from our large fowl silver laced wyandotte hen. I figured - okay, cool! It'll be fun to have some babies around. A couple of our other girls laid eggs in the same box over the next couple of days, and she ended up sitting on 6. Which is about all the room she has under her little bantam butt.
We settled in to wait the three weeks (2 now). But yesterday morning, I moved her off of her clutch to pull out any spare eggs (I marked the ones she was hatching, and pull out others each day), and noticed that one of the eggs had a crack. Ugh, she cracked it.. or did she? NOPE! The little stinker had been hiding one lone tiny little bantam egg somewhere for the previous 2 weeks, apparently. It was pipping.
I didn't want her to abandon all the other eggs - they still had 2 weeks to go. So I grabbed the pipping egg, rushed it home, and tossed it in an incubator. Sure enough, baby hatched out about 4 hours later.
Now, baby is doing great! But.. this evening, she is bored and lonely. She's absolutely tiny, and I ran up to the feed store today to try to get her a friend, but.. it's a bit late in the season. They have a few large fowl chicks that are probably 2 weeks old. I can't find her an appropriately sized friend, as I had been counting on.
So.. any suggestions? Should I just wait it out until she gets a little bigger, and then try to snag her a buddy from the feed store? I could maybe put her under momma hen, and incubate the others. I really would rather not do that, though. Anyone in the Midvale/S Jordan area happen to have a spare day-old, preferably a bantam?
