WHY am I having such bad luck with Broodies?

[BroodyBea]

There is so much to comment on in this story I could ask questions all night. I’m just going to make a few points.

If a hen kills her chicks you don’t let her sit again, no ifs, no buts.



The hen you put in a wire cage to break her broodiness wouldn’t have been laying eggs if she was broody. The egg laying mechanism switches off, usually after 24 hours but occasionally they may lay two more eggs but that will be it. You write you were taking her eggs every day?

Hens to sneak off and make nests outside, but to last a month as you write she would have to have got off the eggs to eat and drink. This is how you find a sneaky broody. You wait near her usual food source and follow her back to her nest.
However, if she had 28 eggs under her then she had either been laying for a month and then sitting for another or she wasn’t broody and had just made a new home away from the rest.
Here the chickens free range and I have never had a hen make a nest out in the open that has been further than 50 metres or so from her usual food source. It does take a bit of commitment to find such secretive nest builders but I haven’t lost one yet for more than 24 hours even if it’s taken me another couple of days to find the nest.
Where did you find her and how far away from where they feed was it?

Going to cycle through your questions and give you as much info as I can.

For letting a chick killer sit again, I completely understand that now. Since my light Sussex let one live, I decided to let her try again, but that seriously backfired on me.

The same hen, who I put in the broody breaker, was definitely what I thought was broody. She was stealing eggs, hiding them in the barn, and when I’d find her, take the eggs and remove her from her nest, she’d hiss, fluff up, full on attack me and run back to the nest. She did this four days in a row so I assumed she was broody again, and placed her in the box. I thought she was trying to lay a clutch, by laying an egg every day. She did this for the duration that it would usually take them to lay a clutch of eggs (per google) all the while displaying signs of being broody- chest plucking, lying over her egg in a corner fluffed up, screaming and hissing, attacking me when I took the egg. So I assumed she was broody. This stopped eventually, so I believed the broody breaker worked.

As far as her going missing, she just disappeared. My flock was about 65 birds, and they all free range over a large acreage and predators happen once in awhile, so I assumed that’s what happened. I feed them their grain in the coop, I have since I started keeping chickens, and never seen her wander around the yard or in the coop for food. I did know eggs were going missing though, from my nest boxes. Well, not really but my egg production drastically slowed while she was gone.

I know she was stealing because when I did find her, she had my olive egger and Easter egger eggs under her, and a few BCM eggs.

I live in a heavily wooded rural area, with a lot of thorny undergrown surrounding the property. I happened upon her by accident when out with the bush saw cleaning it up a bit, about ~100 yards from the coop. She had obviously been there for a long time, as she had two decomposing fully hatched deceased chicks under her, a couple of the eggs that must not have been fertile had exploded under her, and she was lethargic and emaciated. I culled her immediately.

I don’t really know what was wrong with that hen, she just went really really crazy with it. She’s in my picture, with her only raised chick she didn’t kill.

I will add though that I didn’t really look very hard for her. I just automatically assumed a predator had grabbed her, I never once thought she’d be trying to hatch eggs somewhere.