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We have some very exciting news at our house! We have backyard chickens, and one of our hens has gone broody - that means that she has a natural instinct to sit on her eggs until they hatch into baby chicks. It takes 21 days for the eggs to hatch. Follow along here as I will be updating her progress. Hopefully we will have baby chicks on the Nims Farm soon!
We have some very exciting news at our house! We have backyard chickens, and one of our hens has gone broody - that means that she has a natural instinct to sit on her eggs until they hatch into baby chicks. It takes 21 days for the eggs to hatch. Follow along here as I will be updating her progress. Hopefully we will have baby chicks on the Nims Farm soon!
Here's a picture of the chicken coop where our hens live:
We have five hens in our chicken coop. They are 3 years old and we have raised them since they were only 3 weeks old. Their names are Smokey, Popcorn, Lucky, Pepper and Rosie.
Our hens LOVE to make "dust baths" in the sand! When we put new sand into their coop, they burrow their bodies into the sand and snuggle in.
When a hen goes broody, like Smokey has, she will sit on her eggs day and night, leaving only once daily to eat, drink, and poop. If you try to remove her from her eggs, she may hiss at you and peck you. Her natural instinct is to protect her babies at all cost.
Just like humans, chickens need a male (called a rooster) and a female (called a hen) to make a baby. We do not have a rooster in our henhouse, which means that none of our eggs are fertilized. So, even though Smokey is broody and wants to sit on eggs, the eggs that she is sitting on are not fertilized so they will never hatch - no matter how long she sits on them.
Luckily, our neighbor Ms. Bonnie, has a rooster and hens who lay lots of fertilized eggs. She was happy to give us some of her eggs for Smokey to sit on. Here's a picture of my daughter Sophie with our new eggs.
Click on this video to watch Day 1 (April 16) of Smokey's journey to becoming a mother hen:
Oops! We didn't think about the fact that our other hens would continue laying eggs during this time, and we wouldn't be able to tell which ones were the fertilized eggs from Ms. Bonnie's coop and which were ours! So, we learned that we needed to mark the fertilized eggs so we could continue to collect (and eat - yum, yum!) the newly-laid eggs, but leave the fertilized ones for Smokey to sit on.
April 23: Smokey has been sitting on her eggs for 7 days. Let's check on her.
April 30: Smokey has been sitting on her eggs for 2 weeks. Let's check on her.
May 7: Smokey has been sitting on her egg for 3 weeks...it's almost time! Listen closely and you can hear the baby chicks peeping INSIDE the eggs. So cool!
May 14: Baby Chicks! Our baby chicks hatched and are so cute! We have two baby chicks: a hen and a rooster.
June Bug, our baby hen
El Guapo, our baby rooster
Check back often for updates and to follow Smokey's journey to becoming a mother hen!
Check back often for updates and to follow Smokey's journey to becoming a mother hen!
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