OmegaMom

Every home should have a chicken in the garage, especially in these uncertain economic times.

Har.

Yes, we have a chicken in the garage.

A few weeks before Christmas, we noticed that Buffy, our Buff Orfington (yes, a highly original name for a Buff, I realize, but it fits if you use the pre-Buffy-The-Vampire stereotype, as she is a Dumb Cluck), was staying in the nest box a lot.  More than a lot, in fact:  she was pretty much camping out there.

OmegaDad, Keeper of The Chickens, became worried, and consulted Teh Google.

It seems that hens are wired to get “broody”.  A broody hen is a hen who is bound and determined–no matter what–to incubate a clutch of eggs.  First, they nest.  Then, they stay there.  They fluff up all their feathers to keep things nice and warm.  Some will pluck their chest feathers off to make the nest nice and fluffy and insulated, and to raise the humidity level underneath their bodies.

In a nice normal flock of chickens, you’ll have a rooster or two to do his studly duty and inseminate eggs; thus the broody hens can collect enough eggs, sit on them for about three weeks, and voila, baby chicks.  Once the chicks are hatched, the hen will be matronly, guide them to food and water, watch over them, and the broodiness subsides:  they’ve fulfilled their biological destiny.

Our girls, alas, do not have a handy randy rooster around.  Their eggs are doomed to never hatch.  Besides, the OmegaFamily keeps on top of things and does a nest sweep twice a day to collect eggs.

In this situation, the hen suffers from a type of infertility psychology:  They brood.  They hunker down.  They want chicks, dammit!  Everything about their bodies switches from producing eggs to hatching eggs, hormonally and physically.  A broody hen without eggs to incubate just keeps on keeping on, sitting on the nest, leaving once or twice a day to eat and get water and deposit a huge, dog-sized turd (really!) (and really stinky, too!).  They lose weight.  They start being susceptible to parasites on the chest and abdomen because of all the warmth and humidity.  They keep quiet and fluffy and start wasting away.  If you don’t Do Something, you will have a dead hen.

You may also have many hens in the same state, as it is commonly thought to be “contagious”.  My thinking on this issue is it’s probably related to the tendency of female humans to synchronize their menstrual cycles:  a broody hen is a hormonal mess; those hormones probably produce pheromones; those pheromones probably signal to other hens that Now Is A Good Time For Baby Chicks.

(Of course, I have absolutely no data to back this up, but when I came across the contagion idea, it just seemed to click.)

The best thing to do in this case is to “break” the broodiness, shock the bird out of the heat/humidity/nesting/hormonal cycle.  Some people apparently recommend dunking the bird in ice water.  My opinion:  ACK!  One person I read up on suggested putting ice cubes under the hen, as a gentler method.  OmegaDad’s thought was to move her out of the main coop, cool her down, and provide some tender loving care.

So OmegaDad hastily whipped up a temporary coop for the garage, and transferred our poor, brooding Buffy there.  The garage, though heated, is at about 50F.  The temporary coop doesn’t have a nesting box, so there was no place for Buffy to snuggle in and generate heat.

She had, by this time, definitely lost weight, and her comb was a pale grey-pink, as opposed to a nice bright pink-red; apparently all this attention to incubating leads the hens to totally ignore their own physiological processes and (if I read things correctly) shunt a lot of blood to the chest/abdomen area.  She was so weak that she wouldn’t stand up when we picked her up out of the nest, but just sort of trembled and sank back down into a squat on the coop floor.

The end result:  We have a chicken in the garage.  The temporary coop in the cooler area, away from the other hens, was apparently just what she needed.  She is now up and about, no tremors in the hind end, eating like a pig, drinking plenty of water, no more gargantu-poops, and her comb is turning bright pink again.  She is also being spoiled because it’s so cold I’m smoking in the garage, and feeding her red grapes now and then.

She is recuperated enough so that when I go out there, she burbles at me for the grapes, and she will jump up into the air to get one from my hand.  Then she squawks with irritation if I don’t give her more. 

So now we know:  If another of our birds gets broody, we’ll nip it in the bud much sooner.  It was just that this happened while I was heading out of town, and we were preparing for Christmas, etc.