Rescuing eggs
Our Cochin has been almost too good of a mother --- for days at a time, it looked
like she hadn't moved an inch. Only lowered
water levels in her Avian Aqua
Miser reassured me that she wasn't going to die of thirst.
(Yes, I am a worrywort.)
Then the worst
happened. One morning I peeked in her brood coop and noticed five
eggs lying on the ground! Our brood hen had worked her way to the
edge of the drainage tile and a full third of her eggs had slipped off
the nest.
Mark risked his life by tossing all five gently over the hen's back,
hoping that they hadn't been away from her warmth for too long.
The he stacked a cinderblock and brick in front of the culvert as a
temporary lip.
If everything
goes according to plan, we should see the our farm's first homegrown
chicks sometime tomorrow or Saturday. Whether we'll have thirteen
chicks or just a few, though, is still up in the air.
Read all of the entries about
our broody hen:
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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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