"Breaking" News

Our first chick-raising experiment turned out to be yet another lesson in farm life, rather than a success story. We had put six eggs under our broody Buff Orpington hen to start, about 4 weeks ago. A week or two ago, one of the eggs got crushed in the nest somehow, so then we were down to five. A few days ago, we started hearing chirping from inside the eggs, which was pretty exciting. The next morning, there was a baby chick under the hen! An hour or so later, Orrin went back to check on them, and saw that one of the commercial chickens that we had recently added to the flock had killed the chick and was in the process of eating it. Yikes! Orrin then tried moving the hen and her remaining eggs out of the henhouse and into a separate space, but she abandoned the eggs and headed back into the coop to sit on the (now empty) nest that she had been sitting on for the past 3 weeks. So then Orrin moved the eggs back into the henhouse, but put them into one of the higher nest boxes, hopefully out of reach of the aggressive commercial chickens. Of the remaining four eggs, one was half-rotten, so it must have stopped developing early on; two others died in the shell, right around the time they should have been hatching; and the last one would have been fine except that it, too, got eaten by another chicken.

What did we learn from this experience?

1. Keep the broody hen and her eggs separate from the rest of the flock. We didn't have any problems with the heritage hens, but those damn commercial hens have turned out to be way more aggressive.
2. Start later in the spring. Because that hen went broody, we gave her some eggs to see what would happen, but the cold may have contributed to the deaths of a couple of the chicks.
3. We won't be keeping the commercial hens in the flock, long term. They lay pretty well, but we don't want that kind of aggressive behavior in the flock, so we won't be saving any of their eggs to increase the flock.

We're glad we only sacrificed six eggs on this experiment, and hope the next round is more successful. We've got another broody hen, so we'll be trying this process again soon, and will probably put ten or so eggs under her. We'll stick with Rhode Island Red eggs, since that's our rooster.