Kendra’s Gone Broody for Real This Time, Ya’ll

Okay, so the last time we thought Kendra, our Dominique hen, was going broody it turned out to be a false alarm. This time it isn’t.

Out of the eight hens we have, Kendra is the only one with the broody gene in her. I don’t know if it is just her breed or if it has just been bred out of the others we have or what, but once a year Kendra is determined to hatch her some chicks, whether there is a rooster or eggs under her or not.

She is quite a compact bird compared to the other girls who are all a bit large, but when she goes broody her feathers are all puffed out and she looks huge. And when you pet her she makes these defensive clucking noises to let you know she means business. It is nearly impossible to get her to move if there are any eggs under her, but I found that by opening the interior hatch I use to clean out the hen house and throw down scratch in the run leaps off the nest box she’s on and rushes to get her share of cracked corn. I take this very small window of opportunity to gather the eggs before she gets back onto the nest.

With the weather being nice the last few days I’ve had the girls out freeranging, supervised of course, while I worked on the vegetable garden, but Kendra refuses to leave her nest. Having them cooped up so much lately I thought she would relish the opportunity to get out and catch some fresh worms and eat delicious dandelions, but it never happened.

As much as I’d love to just throw a chick or two under her one night and see how well she will be at mothering, we simply are getting too many eggs from the girls at this time. Seriously, even with eating them and making cakes and giving three dozen away at a time we have a ton of eggs in the fridge from the last couple weeks. Unless we got another refrigerator for the garage to store them in I don’t think that option is viable. Hmmm…

So right now we are just going to wait out her broodiness and let it pass. She’s been at it for a little over a week now, which means we probably have two or three more to go before she gives up. Then again, I’ve heard horror stories of hens desperately trying to hatch chicks and literally die in their attempt from starvation. Perhaps we’ll have to do what we did last year and put her in the ferret cage in the open air for a few days to break her. We’ll see.