A brooding hen and introducing new baby chicks!

With the passing of Molly, Mary (our Brahma) went into brooding mode about week later. She decided to sit on 8 eggs for about 3 weeks. If you've never seen a brooding chicken it's a bit sad, especially when you know those eggs aren't fertile and will never hatch. She built a nest in the back of the chicken tractor, and sat on them, not coming out for exercise or food. We tried enticing her with her favorite scratch but no, she sat there trance like. I was really starting to worry, b/c I never saw her eat or drink, but she must have when I wasn't looking. I read that hens will start getting antsy in about the third week and usually get bored and give up sitting on the eggs...we were in that time frame when Pat said he wanted to get more chicks...

After losing two chickens, and being the one that was home when both incidents went down, I wasn't exactly for it. But our friend Lisa wanted more chicks as well, and wanted us to raise them for her, like we had previously, until they can be merged into her existing brood of chickens. With Pat's mom was in town for Mother's Day, and Pat taking that Friday off, we called the Issaquah Grange. Sure enough they just received a shipment of chicks on Weds...so they were probably at least 3 days old. It was now or never if we were going to try the experiment of having Mary accept and raise them as her own. We read that a brooding hen might possibly become a surrogate mother to baby chicks, or she would eat them. We brought home six chicks: 2 americanus (brown like Lucy), 2 Buff Brahma's (like Mary), and two Black Barreds.

With the chicks in a cardboard box, we walked quickly past Mary, b/c our plan was to introduce them at night. I kept joking in the car that with our luck, we'd come home and Mary would have come up off the eggs, b/c she had gotten bored and was done brooding. Well, as Pat was putting the chick feed and scratch into the can, and rustling around with the bags of food, Mary suddenly jumped up off her eggs, and came running out of the coop! Great, now what do we do. She was acting very odd, fluffing up, making odd sounds, eating frantically...like three handfuls of scratch, then went and picked the hell out of the clover in the grass, took a huge poop and then went to the other side of the house, fluffed up and made weird sounds again. So when she wasn't looking we removed the eggs and put the chicks in the coop. She came around the corner and saw them in her coop running around, chirping like crazy. She stood tall and her neck feathers were puffed up...almost like hairs on the back of a dog...so we weren't sure what she was going to do...would she eat them?!

She went into the coop, back to her nest. Pat went into the coop as well and shoved the chicks under her...she accepted them under her when Pat put them there...but if the chicks would leave her and then come running back towards her, she would peck the crap out of them! The chicks would freeze for a couple of seconds, and then, when they felt it was safe, would run as fast as they could away from her! Pat would keep shoving them under her, and still if they ran from her, she would peck the crap out of them when they came back towards her. We think she thought she was protecting her eggs, even though we had removed them. There is one Brahma, that is, well, a bit slow. With all other chicks under her, the one Brahma would be in the coop screatching, like it was yelling for its mother...and not accepting Mary as her mother. Great, so we have 5 that are accepting Mary as the mother and one that is not. Well, after about 6 hrs of Pat continuously shoving the chicks under her and making sure Mary doesn't eat them, it was time to call it a night. Pat put them all under her and closed the coop.

I feared looking in the coop the next morning b/c what if she ate them...ick! Or what if she only ate that one Brahma...or maybe that Brahma would have died b/c it wasn't kept warm b/c it came out from under Mary in the night, and Mary didn't let her back under? All the what ifs went to the way side, once I looked in and they were all still around her, some with their little heads poking out from her wing or her big chest! It was the cutest thing ever! It took one night and they all bonded! No more pecks from Mary.

Here are a bunch of photos from the first day of introduction, May 9.