This story isn't about Goonhammer. This is about one of our new arrivals, an all-white hen. Just to be politically incorrect, I'll call her Cracker. With the addition of Cracker and two unnamed Rhode Island Reds last month, we had eighteen chickens in our flock. That's a lot of poop -- but it's also a lot of eggs, so we take the good with the bad.
There's another reason we don't name the chickens: they occasionally die, and we don't want to get attached. They're not pets, they're farm animals, and we live out in the woods with foxes, possums, and other critters that find chickens just as delicious as a take-out box from Bojangles. We've only lost three in three years. A hawk killed one, one died of exposure because it got locked out of the coop on a freezing night, and one just keeled over after looking lethargic for a few days. So not a bad track record for a family of farmer wannabes.
Last Wednesday night, our son who closed the coop reported that there were only seventeen chickens. Thursday morning's tally confirmed that one was absent. I made a list from memory and determined that Cracker was the one who had gone missing. She wasn't in the coop Thursday night, so we assumed she had wound up on the wildlife menu.
Five days later, Cracker turned up at the water feeder, looking none the worse for wear. When I went to close the coop that night, however, she was missing again. The next day she reappeared, joining her sisters for a squabble over a handful of cracked corn. But this time I kept an eye on her to see if she would sneak off again.
Frankly, I was astonished that Cracker had survived outside the coop at night. The weather has been warm, but the coop protects the girls from predators. Since chickens have no night vision, they always put themselves to bed at dusk, and all we have to do is close the doors to the coop.
Sure enough, Cracker headed off on her own and I followed her to a pile of brush wood. She crawled inside the logs and branches, almost out of sight, and stayed there. No amount of coaxing or food could get her to budge. That's when I knew Cracker had gone broody. In other words, she was sitting on a nest. A hen's mothering instincts kick in when a nest box has about seven or eight eggs, which is why it's important to collect the eggs every day. Hens don't know the eggs haven't been fertilized and will sit on a clutch until Doomsday.
My husband moved some of the logs, reached in, and picked up Cracker, who put up quite a fuss. Sure enough, the crazy hen was sitting on fifteen of her own eggs. Since hens lay an egg about every other day, Cracker had been laying her eggs in this brush pile the entire month she had been with us. When the clutch got to seven or eight, she decided to begin her vigil to hatch them. Poor deluded bird wasn't happy to have her eggs taken away, and she didn't know what to do with herself when it started to get dark. She returned to the brush pile but my son and I herded her into the coop. I'm sure it will take her a few days to recover from the loss of her imaginary chicks.
Surprisingly, Cracker's eggs were all good. They each sank when placed in a bowl of water -- no floaters to indicate a rotten egg. Still, it felt weird to add them to the collection in the 'fridge after she so lovingly sat on them for an entire week. Fifteen eggs! She was one determined chicken.
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