Buffy Mamma

Buffy is our alpha hen. She has been the flock's fearless leader since Red was re-homed. Every night when the chickens march themselves into the coop to go to bed, Buffy stands guard at the entrance, making sure they all go in before she will follow them up the ramp to go to bed herself. Once nestled into the coop, Miss America will snuggle her head down into Buffy's wing and Buffy will hold her underneath like a mamma hen. She is one of the sweetest and friendliest hens, always one of the first to come running to greet us when we go outside.

A few weeks ago, we noticed Buffy spending more and more time in the nest box. Typically, once a hen lays their egg, they jump up like nothing happened and go back to business. Sometimes the process can take a while - up to an hour - but then afterwards it's back outside. Well, she began spending a couple hours, then entire afternoons, in the nest box. On one such day, she finally came out late afternoon, only to return as soon as she'd eaten her dinner. It had become quite obvious what was going on.

Buffy had, as the term goes, gone broody. Broodiness is the condition where a hen gets the motherly urge and wants to set on her eggs until they hatch (typically 3 weeks). The obvious problem with this, is that her eggs were not fertilized - we have no rooster. She was so desperate to be a mamma hen though, that she was sitting on fake plastic eggs (we put those in the nest boxes so that they know they are supposed to lay there.) It was adorably pathetic - she would take one of the plastic eggs and ever so gently use her beak to push it underneath her. She would also become irritated when we took it away.

Broodiness can supposedly be broken - one such method is dunking the hen in cold water. The temperature shock is supposed to disrupt their hormones and snap them out of it. This is what Ned and I decided we were going to do. Ned, however, apparently changed his mind, because when I came home, he had placed 4 fertilized duck eggs he had gotten off craigslist underneath her in a special private nest he had created in the garage. Oh dear.