Broody hen
Since
we want to propagate the genes of birds who have proven themselves on
our farm, we have to find a way to incubate our own eggs. Our
experiments with cheap incubators in the past has been one long
failure, primarily due to our lack of climate-controlled living
conditions. Luckily, nature has a simpler answer --- the broody
hen.
Although most productive
chicken varieties have had maternal qualities bred out of them, some
old-fashioned breeds have a strong biological clock. Once spring
comes around, broody hens like nothing more than to sit on eggs, barely
hopping off the nest for a sip of water and a peck of food once a
day. Our White Cochin is a perfect example, and last week I
noticed that she was starting to lose her breast feathers, a sure sign
that broodiness is about to kick in. This week, we plan to give
her a quiet, dark spot in the back of the coop where she can sit on her
flockmates' eggs and raise up a new set of Walden Effect chickens.
In the long run, it probably
costs more to feed a broody chicken all year than to run an electric
incubator, but after
watching our cochin teach her foster son to forage last year and
leaving all of the warmth worries to her, I was sold on the natural
route. Using a broody hen also keeps our chicken-raising on a
more manageable scale --- an average hen can sit on ten to twelve eggs,
so we won't be stuck slaughtering 25 meat birds at once the way we
would if we ordered chicks from a hatchery. Instead, I hope to
tempt our cochin to raise three batches of chicks this year, which will
pay her keep until she's called upon to do her duty again next spring.
Edited
to add: I wrote
this over the weekend, but since then have started to lose faith in our
particular broody hen, although not in the broody hen concept. I
thought our hen was pulling out breast feathers, but it looks like
she's instead molting...for the second time in six months! I
stuck her in a brood coop, and she started hyperventilating at being
separated from the flock --- clearly, she wasn't in brood mode.
So, we're going to hatch our first set the high-tech
way (I hope!), and
still hope that our broody hen will shape up eventually.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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We use golf balls for this. They're a bit small, but seem to trigger the egg reflex in a hen --- they're very effective in getting the flock to lay in the nest box rather than on the floor.
I usually put just one or two golf balls in a nest, but two months ago I added half a dozen more in hopes of tempting our hen to turn on her broodiness. No luck.