Every morning, when I open the various chicken coops to let the flock out for the day, I make a point of poking my head in to check on the two broody hens and their clutch of eggs.
I had calculated, based on my first observation of the hen sitting on the nest in the compost pile over night, that this weekend was likely going to be the hatch day.
Yup, sure enough, the compost pile brood is in the process of hatching now. So cute. I love watching Mother Nature, well, at least when she enables things like babies hatching or being birthed. Not so much when she enables the other side of the lifecyce (e.g. losing so many young rabbits recently to an outbreak of ME disease in both geodesic dome colonies …).
If you spend enough time around chickens, you learn they actually have a language you can sort of understand. Roosters have about 3 to 5 different vocalizations you can recognize. Hens about the same, maybe a few more, and totally different.
Listen carefully, and you can hear this hen making a sound that I assume is intended to calm the baby chicks. Then, you can hear her start to growl at me as if to say … beat it, I got this, shut the damn door!
And here, I thought I was going to have a nice, quiet, relaxing Saturday. Nope, got a chicken brooder coop to setup now.
These baby chicks may have been born in a compost pile, but they surely will not live in one!
The other broody hen’s nest is in an elevated (about 5 feet off the ground) 5 gallon bucket in the garden coop. Not sure I want those eggs to hatch there, because the chicks will likely jump or fall out. So, I need to relocate that nest too, as they are about to hatch as well.
Decided not to move the newborn chicks from the compost pile nest to a formal brooder (which I would normally do if incubator hatched), but to instead just ‘harden’ the compost pile nest and allow them to “brood in place.”
Why? Because I want to monitor and study the hen’s maternal instincts and behaviors to see how Mother Nature actually intends for baby chicks to be reared. A brooder simulates a mother hen (e.g. heat, humidity, security), but I want to see how an ‘actual’ mother hen operates.
Basically, we’re raising this brood of chicks au naturel.