…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.
