Things I've Learned

This year's attempt to hatch chicks has ended disastrously. It makes me realise we might have been lucky to get chicks at all previously: so here are some lessons I've learned from this episode.

• A hen won't stay broody for ever. Get those fertile eggs under her quick as you can after she goes properly broody.
• Just because a chook can jump out of a pen, it doesn't mean she's bright enough to jump back in to get back on to her eggs.
• Don't bother the hen too much once she's on the nest.
• Dark is good for broody chooks.
• Candling the eggs part-way through the incubation period is probably a really good idea, to find out which have developing embryos. Remove those eggs that aren't developing.
• If the hen kicks an egg out of the nest, there's probably a good reason for it. Don't put it back under her.
• If a hen kicks an egg out twice, definitely don't put it back under her. Listen to what she is telling you, stupid.
• Rotten eggs smell really, really bad.
• An incubator might actually be a good investment.

 These, ahem, learnings, arose out of my attempt to hatch a batch of Light Sussex X Brown Shaver chicks using our one year old Light Sussex hen Kitty. We got fertile eggs from sister Nicky who took custody last year of our Light Sussex rooster (litter-mate - if that's the right phrase - to Kitty) and gave him a harem of Brown Shaver girls to look after. So Kitty went broody and dutifully sat on 12 eggs holding her potential nieces and nephews for 19 days before giving up and hopping off the nest. Nineteen days. It isn't long enough.

Twenty-four hours after I knew they should have hatched, I broke open all 12 eggs to see what had happened. Seven contained almost fully-formed but very much dead chicks. Three showed no particular sign of embryo development, and two were rotten. Nastily rotten. I confess I ran away once I had cracked them open. I believe I may have shouted at the kids "Run, run!". I may also have been too scared to go back down to collect the day's eggs from the other chickens, because I would have had to walk past the place where I broke open the rotten eggs. It was a bad experience.

Why did she give up incubating the eggs? I can't be sure, but suspect it was a combination of reasons. There was a delay of almost 10 days between her going broody and getting the eggs under her. We fiddled around her run a bit trying to ensure it would provide a safe place for the chicks while they were very young and vulnerable to cats, and perhaps this disturbed her at a critical time. We enclosed the walls of her run but she was able to get over the fence - and possibly was too silly to find her way back into the run and back on to her nest. And finally, we allowed her to sit on infertile and rotten eggs. I am speculating, but wonder if she could smell the rotten ones and this fooled her into thinking the whole lot were bad. I feel quite sad that our poor management (probably) resulted in the death of seven chicks who were developing nicely until they got abandoned. Cousin Suzy asked if we would try again this year - at the time I thought "no" - but that resolution lasted all of a week until our next hen went broody a day or three ago.