Well, hee it is the middle of May and i'm just getting back to blogging. Today I wanna talk about broodiness. No, not the walking around with a storm cloud over your head type of broodiness.
I am talking about a broody hen. Basically, from time to time, a hen will become overwhelmed with the need to sit on a clutch of eggs and hatch them and raise chicks. It has happened twice in a very short period of time with blacky, our black cochin.
How do you break a hen of broodiness? There are several schools of thought on this one. One method is to dunk the hen in cool water, the idea being to cool down their body heat. Another thought is to suspend the hen in a wire cage without a floor above the ground, or put her into a cage with a rooster for at least a week. The idea is to make her uncomfortable, and breaking her concentration from the nestbox. We both think these methods are a little cruel.
What we ended up doing is isolating her from the other hens in a separate part of the coop so that she couldn't see or reach the nestbox, while allowing her to see the other hens. After a few days, she was cured. Unfortunately in a few weeks, she was back in isolation. She seems to be cured again, hopefully we'll see if it holds for a while this time.
Until next time, Head Chicken Wrangler
Peace
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