Brood hen success
When
we were in South Carolina last month, Daddy gave me eleven fertilized
Rhode Island Red eggs to try to hatch out. I brought them home
and started preheating the incubator, only to discover that the cheap
brand we'd gotten at the feed store only works if you keep your room
temperature very constant. So I made a spur of the moment
decision and popped the eggs in the brood coop with our White Cochin instead.
Regular
readers may remember that we tried a similar experiment last fall, with
the result that our
hen killed the only chick that hatched. But I wanted to give
our hen another chance before putting her on the dinner table, figuring
she may have killed her first batch of chicks because their color made
it obvious that they weren't her own. Rhode Island Red chicks are
pale, so color wouldn't be an issue this time around.
I added a lip to her
culvert nest so that none of the eggs would roll out, then I threw the
hen in the coop. I'd heard her make a broody moan the week
before, but she wasn't really broody yet and it took her most of the
week to decide the eggs were worth sitting on. By then, I figured
our chances of getting a hatch were close to nill, so I didn't even
post about it, but I left the hen to sit on the nest since I figured I
might as well get the broodiness out of her system.
Saturday
morning, I dropped by to toss in a bit of feed...and saw a fluffy chick
running in and out of the Cochin's feathers! I moved the automatic chicken waterer into the culvert nest at
chick eye level and tossed in some chick feed, and the peep immediately
followed the mother's lead, eating and drinking. It seems quite
healthy, and the Cochin has clearly accepted it, so the only question
now is...will it be a new layer or a broiler? And have I finally learned enough that next time we'll get a good hatch rate?
| This post is part of our Farm Experiments lunchtime series.
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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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