Month: August 2017

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We have baby chicks…

…but Mrs. Hen didn’t hatch them.  I found a broken egg on Sunday, and another one broken yesterday.  The eggs were well past 21 days incubation by then, and after scouring the Internet and asking anyone I could, I determined that the eggs were dead.  I don’t know why they died after living long enough to make a fully formed chick with feathers, but I have a few ideas.
1.  Chicken ineptitude.  Broodiness has been bred out of hens so that they have forgotten all their maternal instincts.   Although this hen sat faithfully on the eggs, perhaps she forgot to turn them enough or forgot to heat and cool them properly.
2.  SC’s heat wave.  See number 1.  For the first two weeks, SC’s early August weather was relatively cool.  If anyone is reading this who lives in a cool climate, you will think I am insane, but 85 or even 88 degrees F feels rather fall-like.  88 degrees, plus heat from the chicken body, shouldn’t exceed 100 degrees or so.  As I understand things, 99 degrees and 60% humidity is ideal for hatching chicken eggs.  Over the past week or so our air temperatures and humidity have gotten near this number.  My chicken house is in direct sun and the nesting boxes have a western exposure, so on hot afternoons I imagine the temperature under the eggs could easily exceed 99 degrees.  A broody who knows what she’s doing should be able to regulate the temperature, but maybe my chicken didn’t know how.
So yesterday my girls and I went to Sal’s Ol’ Timey Feed and Seed in Columbia, near my home, and picked out five Americana chicks.  We had all decided we wanted to have chicks.  I hoped the broody would accept them, but when I presented one to her under very close supervision, after removing her from the nest containing the dead eggs, she wasn’t interested.
Well, she was interested, and she even made some of the “churring” noises mother hens make to the babies, but then she went back to preening her feathers and trying to escape the new enclosure.

I was afraid to trust her with the babies.  And, I was afraid I couldn’t keep them safe in this rickety chicken tractor shack into which I would have had to put them if she wasn’t completely invested in caring for them.  So, the chicks are now living on the back screened porch which is, we pray, fortified against snake incursions.

Mrs. Hen and her companion have been banished to the chicken tractor with no access to nests. Without access to nesting material, they should forget about being broody in a week or so.  They spend their time trying to escape the chicken tractor; Mrs. Hen gave me quite a start this morning when I went out to check on her because she had vanished!  There were no signs of a struggle and, most importantly, no feathers (no chicken dies without feathers flying everywhere) and so I found her back in the chicken house sitting on a nest.  She had managed to push the wire aside and escape.  I put her back in the chicken tractor and fixed the hole with zip-ties.

Sal tells me that her Old English Game birds hatch out chicks regularly even in the heat.  Perhaps I will get some of them and try again one day.  We would love to see mama bird and her babies.  Maybe one of these new chicks will turn out to be a rooster and we will have our own fertile eggs.  For now, we will enjoy these babies.

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Waiting for baby chicks

This is a video of my chicken sitting on her eggs.My Buff Orpington chicken has persisted in her delusion that if she sits on eggs long enough, surely they will hatch.  Even though there is no rooster, and even though I removed the eggs every day, she still sat on the nest.  Earlier in the spring I removed a Buff Orpington (I don’t know if this is the same Buff Orpington chicken but I suspect that it is) and her co-delusional chicken to another chicken house without access to a nest for a couple of weeks to break the broodiness.  This process worked for a couple of months, but she has been broody for a month or more, I suppose.  I traveled a lot during July and was not certain which chicken was on the nest.

After I realized she was determined to raise some chicks, I remembered a friend’s offer of fertile eggs. We have had two roosters.  As my girls say, one of them  was nice and stupid, and the other one was mean and smart.  The nice one met his end defending the ladies against a bobcat, and the mean one died last summer at the end of a hatchet blade.  I had scars on my ankles from his spurs, my girls were scared to go into the chicken pen, and with a baby about to become a toddler I didn’t want to risk permanent damage to anyone.  We would like a nice and smart rooster to add to our flock.

My friend gave us a dozen fertile eggs.  In this video you can see and her co-broody.  Originally I planned to split the dozen eggs between the two hens because I believed the Barred Rock was also serious about broodiness.  After I put the eggs under her (watching her carefully and knowing that the ambient air temperature in SC in August is nearly hot enough to brood eggs without a chicken–just kidding, sort of) I realized within a day or less that she was not serious.  She got off the nest, forgot which nest she was supposed to sit on and got onto another nest, sat in the nest backwards, and is generally a mess.

After I saw my Buff Orpington in action, with her constant attention to the eggs and her faithful sitting except for a brief stretch and dust bath in the afternoon, I took the eggs from the Barred Rock and gave them all to the Buff.  One egg broke within the first couple of days.

Another egg broke earlier this week.  Inside the egg was an almost fully-formed chick, complete with feathers.  Although I was sad about the loss of the chick, I was glad to see that things were going okay with some of the eggs.

Earlier in the incubation period I held the eggs up to a flashlight beam and saw the eye spot and some blood vessels developing.  Now I see a dark blob in the eggs.  Eggs without a developing embryo are translucent.  Seeing the eye spots and blood vessels develop within the egg was nearly as exciting as seeing my own babies on ultrasound.  Okay maybe not quite that exciting, but seeing new life is miraculous!  Plus, I don’t have to be pregnant to see this life happen

Check out the video of the hen here on YouTube, and, as long as there is no disaster, I hope to share a video of chicks hatching within the next couple of days.  I put them under her on July 29; it takes 21 days for the chicks to hatch, so we expect babies within the next couple of days.  Maybe they will be here for the eclipse; we are in an area of totality and I also hope to share a video of my chickens going to roost in the middle of the day.