Tag Archives: broody hens

The days are getting longer

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The days are getting longer, Spring is in the air, with the promise of summer to come, there’s a great sense of excitement in the garden, you can almost feel the grass growing and the daffodils bursting into brilliant yellow splashes of sunshine.

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Here is Charlie with his foster-mum – Mrs Grey – and I’ve called the other chick Ebony – I think he (or she) is a pure  is a pure Vorwerk.  If so (s)he’ll look like one of these when (s)he grows up:

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This is Captain Von Vorwerk with Violet, they are quite impressive hens and they lay little white eggs.

What Happened to Amber?

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What Happened to Amber?

After the squirrel episode yesterday, when I went to let the hens out, I looked for Amber, half expecting a squirrel to be in her pen again – and all I found was a pile of feathers!  The door of the pen was open and the protective wire had been ripped off the bottom of the pen.  Amazingly Charlie chick was OK but cheeping pitifully.

I put him in with the other broody hen who has two chicks and watched with my heart in my mouth to see if she would accept him – quite often hens will not have anything to do with chicks they haven’t hatched themselves – but thankfully she let him snuggle down with the others under her feathers and he stopped cheeping.

So what had eaten Amber?  I’ve seen foxes rip open wire pens and get through really small gaps but foxes generally carry off their prey and eat it somewhere else.  A polecat maybe?  I know that I didn’t leave the door open because there’s a picture of the pen on this website that I posted yesterday – so what opened the door?

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Broody hens

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Some of the hens are still laying eggs – but two of them have gone broody.  Mrs Brown is really good-natured and lets me move her anywhere but Honey is very bad-tempered and pecks me when I go near her.  I have moved them to a rabbit cage so the other hens don’t bother them.  Once the chicks are all hatched and big enough to hop about I move them to a bigger pen but with a shallow water bowl.  Baby ducklings can also drown if they can’t get out of a water bowl.

When there are young chicks about I always put a brick in the big water bowl so little ones can get out.  Dane was helping me just after Christmas last year.  We had a chick that hatched on Christmas Day so we called him Jesus (he later turned out to be a girl!).  Dane asked me why there was a brick in the water bowl and I answered:  “It’s so Jesus doesn’t drown.”  Dane replied:  “I thought Jesus could walk on water!”

(L to R) Snowflake, Doris and Dillon

(L to R) Snowflake, Doris and Dillon