About a month ago we set out to let our poor broody hen actually go ahead and be a mum... this time every year she sits on whatever eggs she can find, until we remove them that is. Feels mean but until now we didn't want any more hens!
Our flock of 11 hens has slowly been diminishing with hen illness and random death so we have only 5 chickens left. Joe bought some eggs online for Lintilla to sit on. Which she did. Day 21 (hatching day), nothing happened. Or the next day. Or the next. By day 28 we felt any chance of baby chicks was pretty slim, so decided to buy some day old chicks and see if Lintilla would adopt them. She didn't. She didn't seem maternal towards them at all in fact, pecking them quite a lot. By the next morning we had hoped she would have changed her mind or got confused and thought that her eggs had hatched. No such luck, so she had to go back to the flock and the chicks will have to do their growing up on their own...
I must say they are are doing a very good job! They were eating, sleeping, drinking, scratching around, preening, and all that jazz within a day!
Now they are looking very active...they go everywhere at 100 mph !!
No comments:
Post a Comment