Boston Gets in the Mood

Sometimes a hen gets broody, which means that she gets the urge to sit on eggs night and day. Here's how it all works: Hens lay about an egg a day during the part of the year when the days are longer than 15 hours. After they've laid a clutch of eggs in a nest (maybe 8 or 10), they stop laying and sit on the eggs 24/7. They get off the nest a few times a day to get a bite to eat, but basically they sit there all day long, with their feathers puffed up to cover all the eggs, looking like a toad in a trance.

When we had chickens before, our hens never got broody. They couldn't care less that we took their eggs away every day, and they never seemed to stay in a nest longer than it took to lay an egg -- 20 minutes, maybe. But Jordan noticed that Boston, the smaller of our two feather-foots, was in the nest every time we went into the hen house, and she'd started sleeping there instead of on the perches with everyone else. Kabob the rooster insists that all his hens sleep on the highest perch, which is about six feet off the ground, but he made an exception in her case.

We tried to "break her up," the technical term for talking a hen out of sitting on a nest. What a joke! We threw her off the nest. We took her outside. We walked around with her. We even took her into the house to hang out with us. No luck -- as soon as we put her back in the hen house, she was back on a nest.

"It's August," said Margy, "and too late for hatching chicks! They'll still be little when it gets cold, and they'll freeze." But soft-hearted Jordan hated to see Boston wasting her time, so on about the third day of Boston's vigil we stuck the day's eggs under her.