Broody Hens

One of the chickens, Robot, has been broody for about the past 2 weeks and has started sitting on her eggs. Usually, the hens wake up in the morning, have some breakfast, forage for a few hours, lay an egg and then go back to looking for worms and bugs to eat. I suspect this is a similar routine for most chickens, but if a rooster is present, hens may end up with fertilized eggs which causes a hormonal change and results in brooding.

Previously, we had collected the unattended eggs throughout the day without the hens seeming to notice. Robot has stopped leaving the roost box except for about an hour each morning where she will eat ravenously, go to the bathroom and return to her eggs. We have not separated her from the other chickens and haven’t created any barriers so we keep finding additional eggs in her box. Sometimes it is easy to identify which ones aren’t hers, but sometimes it can be more difficult. We have candled several and know for sure there are 5 that contain developing embryos and we have tried to mark them so they are more easily identified, but suspect some of them aren’t hers at all and that she is doing the work for Clucky.

Recently, Plucky also seems to be broody, but she is quite young and fairly ineffective at managing her lone egg so we are even less hopeful that it will hatch, but 5 chicks will be plenty for this year!