Chicken Behaviour 201: Broody hens

At approximately 11 months old, at the beginning of April, our hens started to “go broody”. This means that instead of laying an egg and then wandering off to eat or drink or dust bathe or chase each other around the coop, as they had been doing for the past few months, they started to sit on their eggs, and refuse to get off. I started wearing work gloves to the coop to protect my hands from being pecked, and we started to get partially developed embryos in some of our eggs; which brings us to lesson the first:

1. Broody hens steal eggs from each other. At first there was only one or two hens sitting, so I mistakenly thought that eggs laid in the other next box (the one without  a hen sitting in it) or on the floor of the coop, would be OK to eat (OK, as in “not contain a partially developed chick embryo”). But no, even some of the eggs that weren’t being sat on were partially developed. This is because broody hens don’t have a very good concept of which eggs are theirs – they see eggs, then sit on them. And if they only have one or two eggs to sit on, they steal more from another hen. They don’t necessarily wait for the other hen to get off the next to stretch her legs or drink some water, either – I’ve watched a hen poke her head under another sitting hen, prise and egg out with her beak, then tuck it under herself.

Lesson the second, therefore, follows directly from lesson the first:

2. If you want any eggs at all once your hens start to go broody, you need to mark every egg that is being sat on. I must be a little slow, because it took me a couple of weeks to figure this out. Then I went into the coop with a thick black pencil, and drew a large “X” on every egg that a hen was sitting on (which was all of them, by the way, see above). Now each morning I go into the coop, and gently lift each hen off her clutch of eggs. Any eggs that aren’t marked come into the house. They seem to have gotten used to me doing this, now, and no longer peck at my hands.

Lesson the third:

3. The best nest box is still the best nest box, even if it’s got a broody hen sitting on a clutch of eggs in it. So the other hens still try to lay in the best nest box, which means they climb in on top of the sitting hen to lay. Or two hens try to brood in the same nest box.

Lesson the fourth:

4. Once a broody hen feels she is sitting on “enough” eggs (and “enough” seems to be a number between 3 and 15), she stops laying and just sits and incubates the eggs. As a result, we’re down from 6 to 8 eggs a day from 10 hens, to 2 or 3 eggs a day (from 6 or 7 broody and 3 or 4 non-broody hens).

Lesson the fifth:

5. Next year, if I actually want to know when the eggs are due to hatch, it would be a good idea to write the date on them in pencil, rather than just marking them with an “X”. I expect some to start hatching within a week or so, which would be quite cool, seeing as how our hens were hatched May 1st.

Lesson the sixth:

6. Speedy, our beta rooster, has no respect for the fact that a broody hen is sitting on a clutch of eggs. He climbs on top of her and does his thing regardless. She seems quite unimpressed.