Broody Woes: Olive Edition
Our Ada set the brooding level really high with puff ups, blood curling screams, and pecks to any hand close enough to remove eggs. Fortunately, after a few weeks, she got over it and resumed days full of sunbathing and gobbling up snacks. Seemed easy enough and with not too many of our chickens on the list of breeds known for being broody we felt prepared for the next time one of our girls succumbed to hormones and decided to sit on unfertilized eggs in hopes they would hatch 21 days later.
Olive starting showing signs that she was going broody back in April. Of course at the time with Poppy moving back out to the coop from being a house chicken, Nettie moving into the house as we put her on an artificial daylight schedule, and you know, the whole world shutting down as COVID19 started to spread, it’s all a blur.
Then again, it’s 2020. You know, the year that really has no regular flow of time. So when Chickie Daddy and I started talking about when the last time we saw one of her mossy eggs, we checked the egg log thinking 2 months.
Nope. 4 months.
Then when we starting thinking about all the (failed) attempts, and yeah, it’s been a long few months:
Egg songs paired with camera surveillance allowed for prompt egg collection while working from home.
Breaks out to the yard allowed for short walkabouts and eviction from the nesting box…until she sprints back into her coop. This is a near nightly occurrence that’s not making any progress.
Chickie Momma would demand quality time with her, sometimes in the house away from her nest.
Read about cool baths. Tried it. She didn’t mind it in the heat of the day, but it didn’t prevent her from sprinting back to her nesting boxes.
Read another approach about placing ice packs under her (again, to lower her body temp) but she would relocate to another box or, sit on those dang packs until they were warm. This was a game a few days in a row that we played, until we gave up.
It sure feels like a lost cause and we’re just going to have to let her hormones run their course, but since she’s spending so much time on the nest and not foraging and scratching she is losing weight. Of course her Chickie Parents do provide “room service” of mealworms, peanuts, and summer produce so she’s not completely missing out on the good stuff.
So it’s time to head back to the chicken books, fellow chicken owners, and Google searches for the next list of possible solutions.
