Jail Bird

Winter is exhausting. The snow never seems to melt before the next snow fall. The days are not getting longer fast enough. I linger in bed every morning trying to devise an excuse not to eschew my warm blankets for a frigid room, which is why I can't blame Helga for doing her own brooding. 

You may recall that Helga is one of my hens and just three months into her first laying cycle she's gone "broody."  That means she wants to set, or nest on her eggs until they are hatched. Of course, she doesn't have any eggs, because she stopped laying when she decided to set. That doesn't keep her from sitting on the other girls' eggs. She keeps hopping onto eggs, and I keep taking them from her. Wow, is she ever cross about that. She hasn't resorted to pecking at me, but her hackles stand on end in an impressive display of feathers worthy of a Las Vegas showgirl. 

Helga calms down from a samurai moment.

Unfortunately when I take this broody girl out of the nest, she's more warrior than beauty. She literally has to be dragged out trilling and squirming. She claws the walls of the nest trying to hold onto it. That is heartbreaking enough without her bewilderment in defeat. Once pulled from the nest she is overwhelmed by agitation. All of her feathers stand up. She holds her wings away from her body, doubling in size. This is when she starts to look like a samurai warrior. In her turmoil she puts on quite a display in her feathery armor.
She stands on my arm, then jumps to the floor, then circles the room, then jumps to the perch. Javier and the girls see the threat and move to put her in her place. The subsequent feather plucking she gets only upsets her more and she retreats to a perch away from the others where she can make an impressive display from a safe distance. The poor girl can't be consoled with petting, she only wants her nest.

I waffled on the subject of solving the problem and even on whether there is a problem. She will get over it eventually, but the dedication to the nest means that she will neglect her health -- rarely eating, rarely drinking -- until those chicks come. Since there are no eggs to make chicks it will take that much longer for the nesting hormones to wear off. I could feed her a little in her nest, but that doesn't deal with the fact that she's combative on the few occasions she emerges on her own. I finally concluded that the best solution was to break the cycle.

With giving Helga fertilized eggs to sit on being out of the question, there are no humane ways to break her cycle left. If she were a human female with a hormonal imbalance that caused her to be alternately lethargic and aggressive we'd have a drug for it no doubt. I'm not sure that the way we drug humans at the first signs of depression or irritability is particularly humane either, but it is certainly better than the methods available for a chicken like Helga who is stuck in a no-win situation. Unfortunately, there are no drugs for broody hens.

We have opted for separating her into an elevated cage. I do not know the science behind it, but it has been explained that restricting a broody hen in a cage with airflow from below will make it impossible for her to nest and eventually convince her body to let up on the nesting hormones.  In the meantime, she can't fight with the other chickens, and she has easy access to her own food and water supply.

I converted a wire dog crate into a suspended pen by wiring it to the roost on one side of the chicken coop. I put a couple of 2"x2" roosts inside the pen so that she could at least get her feet off of the cold wire floor when the temperatures dropped. I added a cup for her chicken scratch snacks, a food container and a waterer.

While she put up her usual desperate, heart-breaking fight to stay in her nest, she handled being put in the crate very well. Her first order of business was what all hens do when they leave the nest for a short break; she pooped a pile of chicken manure twice the size of anything Javier has ever produced. Then she ate like she had never seen food. Then she drank and then she started trying to figure out how she was going to get back to her nest. After a bit of pacing, she stepped up on the little roost and settled in.

Jail Bird

That was three days ago, and I've noticed that she seems quite content on her own. She's also acted calmer on being approached. Today I let her out for a test. She managed to act normal for five minutes, then she got into a fight with one of the hens and retreated to her favorite nest. 

Unfortunately the nest was occupied, so she tried to sit on the hen who was there. For this, Helga got herself banished back to the crate. We'll test her again in a few more days.

#farmdiva