Over Easy, Please

I had to laugh when I looked on our broody hen. She had so many eggs underneath her bulk that they were spilling out all around her body! Although I wondered at how so many additional eggs might have appeared since I'd last looked in on her, I believed the excess eggs were all recent arrivals. Upon looking more closely, I saw that she had moved the nest from the back corner of the dog crate / hen house into the center, and had pulled much of the remaining bedding up around her--effectively padding the nest. Finally I realized that I had caught her in the act of turning the eggs!

When humans place eggs into an incubator, we're instructed to turn the eggs diligently every four hours--or to invest in an automatic egg turning device. At the time I had first decided to allow the hens to keep some eggs, a time when the hens were most often off the nest, I marked the eggs I wanted to leave with a black ballpoint pen and planned to only collect unmarked eggs in the future. Well, discerning which eggs were marked was no easy task because mama hen turned them frequently. I never seemed to have a wax crayon or colored marker on hand when checking the nest. Plus, I had concerns about the ink from a marker penetrating the egg shell. So I finally stopped sifting through the eggs and just left all laid in the crate to the hens.

Watching this hen dedicate her life to hatching these eggs has been humbling. In the pictures, an empty white dish appears turned over in the back of the crate; when I'd realized that this hen was rarely moving even to eat, I started putting laying mash into the dish and setting it close so that she could reach it. The one day I tried to stroke her in empathetic support, she raised her beak to defend her eggs; I have not tried that move again. When the dish moved out of my easy reach and closer into the hens immediate circle, I left it untouched. Some days I just sprinkle the food onto a wedge of wood (because I found one conveniently handy the last time I was in search of a dish). This works because Ms. Broody removes the feed but doesn't relocate the heavier wood.

A final note: Ms. Broody chose to move her eggs away from the corner of the "hen house" just as a cold front was blowing in. After several early-summerlike days, the return of winter seems to have prompted her to keep the eggs as warm as possible.

Sit on, Broody Hen.