The Broody Hen

It was inevitable really. Some breeds of hen are better know for being broody than others, and our four all fit into this category. None more so than our two Orpington's and Lemon has decided that it is definitely time to live up to this stereotype.

I got home from work on Wednesday to find that we only had three hens wandering around the run. Lemon was settled in the nest box. I lifted her up to fetch any eggs that had been laid to discover that she wasn't trying to lay - but was sitting on three eggs (including one of her own). Both her tummy and the three eggs were surprisingly warm. Alarm bells went off inside my head.

From this point we started a little battle. I would take her out of the nest box and encourage her to join the others in exploring the garden. She would wander round outside for a bit and then disappear back inside again. On Thursday afternoon I shut her out of the nest box for a few hours. She didn't seem phased by this at all, but returned to her dark corner within minutes of me opening the pop hole.

So it came to drastic action. We decided to try and break her of this bout of broodiness. A hens determination to sit on some eggs can often lead to illness from refusing to leave the nest to eat or drink and we didn't want it to go this far.

As far as I can tell there are a few methods of doing this and all centre on cooling the hen down. Her hormones will raise her temperature to help keep the eggs toasty, so by cooling her down you trigger the end of this process - as if she'd left the nest of her own accord.

A popular method is to put them in a separate cage (like the sort of thing used during puppy training) and raise it off the ground so that there's a cool air flow all around. You'll probably need to do this for a week or so. We don't have such a cage, so skipped that one and moved onto an easier option.

We planted ice cubes in the next box. I'd love to have seen her reaction when she first discovered them. As far as we can tell she probably sat on them for most of the day, she was certainly still there that evening. The nest box was a soggy mess and we were all ready for a repeat the next day.

However, to our relief she showed no signs at all of wanting to spend the following day sitting on eggs and all was back to normal. Ice 1: Lemon 0. I hope we don't have to repeat this too many times over the summer.

An icy day

Winter has definitely arrived in Wales. Some parts of the country have had snow - we haven't been that (un)lucky yet. We have had an abundance of frosty mornings though.

My understanding is that chickens aren't too bothered by temperatures around freezing. They'll live in areas that drop to -20 centigrade (certainly not something we have here). They'll happily huddle together at night for warmth and don't seem bothered by frozen ground in the day. There are just one or two little things that we have to be careful about while the weather is like this.

The main problem is that their water container has a tendency to freeze over. Some days this just means cracking the ring of ice around the bottom and flicking it out so that the fresh water from inside can flow out again. Other days the ice has been more widespread and has meant we've been bringing the whole thing in and sitting it under a warm tap in order to get it all back to normal again.

Another cold weather thing we've been thinking about is a change to their food. When topping up our supplies of pellets for the girls, we noticed they were on multi-buy with mash. As far as I know pellets and mash are exactly the same food - its just that one sort has been formed into pellets to make it easier to handle. You can treat them the same and feed either as dry food, but you can also mix the mash with water for a porridge-like consistency. Several other chicken bloggers have said they make up warm mash on particularly cold mornings and we thought that sounded like a good but potentially messy idea. As yet we haven't found time to give it a go though. Maybe as we're home more over the Christmas holidays we'll give it a try - I'll let you know how we get on.