One of our chickens went missing – it happens, for a
number of reasons. So, they wander next door, decide the food,
service or both is better and stay the night, and the following day
the neighbour asks is this your chicken? Or, they wander too
far, something with teeth and claws decides that the food looks good,
the chicken stays for more than just the night, and the following
day, the pile of feathers says that was tasty.
And then there is the third option – unbeknownst to
us, a hen has been laying her eggs somewhere other than the nest
boxes we provide. Then, having laid a good number, she disappears to
go broody. This time, her name is Carnival.
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| Our missing bird taking a (dust) bath. |
She disappeared two nights back, so cue the late-night
walk around the field checking for sad heaps of feathers. I found
nothing, and these days the neighbours send our occasional marauding
hens home, so that left broody, or killed further away. Finding a
white hen in the dark by lamplight sometimes works... Carnival is
brown with stripes, and yellow patches - I gave up looking once the
daylight went.
The following morning, I took a more extensive look, but
still no sad pile of feathers, no she wasn’t at the neighbours, but
she didn’t turn up for breakfast either, and in the past broody
hens turn up for the morning grain.
At this point, we wrote Carnival off as a probable
distant fatality but, around lunchtime, when we were talking through
exactly which brown hen was missing, making sure that it really was
Carnival (because she’s not the only one in brown and stripes) I
pointed to a particular hen and said... isn’t that the missing
one?
Yes. Carnival was back. Not broody at all, right?
Wait, what’s that smell? What did I just tread in? We call
it the broody turd. After twenty-four hours (approximately)
of sitting on the eggs, a hen has a lot of well-fermented faeces
stored up and looking for somewhere to go. Not only is the broody
turd big, but it has reach and presence, a foul miasma that spreads
and lingers. Maybe she is broody then.
So, decision time. Shut her in somewhere until she gets
bored of being broody, or track her back to the nest. We’ve lost a
few hens this year, and the lock her in routine is not easy to
get right, so we opted to track Carnival.
Now, about this lunchtime business – it was a
nice day, so we were going to eat out, lunch was already on the
plates and ready to go when I spotted our missing hen. I took the
first watch, whilst my partner ate, and then we swapped. Yes, we
could both eat and watch, but a hen on the way back to her
nest can be a nippy little devil. In the time you take to put lunch
somewhere safe from all the other hens, she could be gone... And then
it’s another twenty-four hours or so before the next opportunity.
So, what does a young bird do when she comes off the
eggs? A dust-bath, obviously, a quick freshen up just after dropping
that broody turd, and then a bite to eat. Hey, there’s an idiot
human following me, how about some grain, mate? Then perhaps
another dust bath, a leisurely stroll to fool anything trying to
follow her back to the nest, maybe a bit of sun-bathing. Then
another stroll... are we paying attention... how about a stroll
around the corner box of the stables where the hens normally live.
Still paying attention, are we?
She vanished. How hard can it be to watch a chicken?
There one moment, gone the next. Somewhere in the vicinity of the
stables...
By a process of elimination, we worked out where she is.
Probably. There’s a whole run of out-buildings... those either
side of the one the chickens use are piled high with stuff in
storage. So, if she’s in one of those, we just have to take
everything out...
So, we had a plan – watch and wait, and then follow
our elusive broody once she comes out for lunch. We will watch
carefully – we know where she vanishes, so those decoy
strolls can be ignored... and then we will know which box.
The following day, with another round of really nice
weather, I set an alarm on my phone to patrol the yard every twenty
minutes. Carnival was a no-show at mid-day and eventually, we had
lunch in one of those twenty minute gaps, certain that the moment we
sat down she would appear, but not this time. In due course, on
account of the weather, we had a decent serving of some home-made
ice-cream, and as I stepped out of the house with that, there
was Carnival.
She strung us along for nearly an hour and even then, we
almost missed it. One moment she was pecking around and then, like
something out of a Bond movie, she slipped into the shadows, and made
a run for it, up on to the perch, up again onto a stack of boxes, and
through a ridiculously tiny gap into the store next door.
This is where human guile outwits hen speed. I had all
the doors with their bolts barely hanging on. We knew which way she
went and got the adjacent door open just a crack to watch her go over
all the stacked junk and narrow down the approximate nesting site.
And on the third day... as per the forecast, the weather
turned grey and we spent a few hours carefully emptying the store,
working back until a certain box that felt too heavy for its size...
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| In the egg-box |
Carnival is now with her eggs in a nice, solid nest box,
safe from the rats and other predators. The hole to next door is
blocked. She will try to go back. They always do. It will
take a few days before her head is re-programmed to recognise the
nest box as hers.
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| The new home - are you sure those are mine? |
In the meanwhile, we check on her from time to time. All
is going well. She has that grim and brooding look... put those
fingers in here and you won’t be getting them back. That’s
how a broody hen is supposed to be.
