The last of our hens that have been missing re-appeared today with 8 chicks following her around! Looking back on the calendar I see that she has been missing for about 3 weeks, which is the time it takes to hatch out a nest of eggs.
The chicks are very adorable, as usual. I think she is one of the hens that kept going broody and we kept throwing her off the nests in the coop to try to discourage her from setting. I guess she would not be denied and just moved out to the wild to have her nest and took her chances!
She was the fourth hen that had been missing, and now they are all accounted for again. Three of them survived and hatched off bitties but the one met her demise. We found the feathers and some bones a couple of weeks ago.
We had purposely allowed one hen to set and she hatched off 6 chicks, but as I wrote earlier she and four of her chicks were killed by some kind of predator. And one of our woods-hatched flock was wiped out by something, killing 9 of 10 chicks.
I hope these 8 have better success. We may try to find where she nests and transfer them all into a protective cage. This is working well with Cinnamon, but we moved her into the cage before her chicks hatched. Each night she has her 5 in with her and we close her up and each morning we let her out to take her chicks on their adventures.
It is nice to see baby chicks on the farm. (We have pictures of them that I may get uploaded here hopefully soon.)
No comments:
Post a Comment