every chick deservers a mother
It’s a quiet, drizzly spring day. The brooding hen’s chicks are hatching. This is what a hatched egg looks like. For the first day or two, it is next to impossible to see the chicks. The mother keeps them tucked in underneath her. At times you can hear them peeping, but if you approach, she will tell them to be quiet. This evening, we will move her and her chicks into a protected nursery.
Ina-Svenda is one of my favorite hens. She has a face that is impossible not to love.
It’s about her last day brooding. I can hear some of her chicks starting to peep. They start peeping before they hatch so I’m not sure if some have already hatched, or if they are about to. So what drives a hen to sit on a clutch of eggs for three weeks? Is it love? Nothing but instinct? What drives a woman to carry a child to term. Is it love? Nothing but instinct?
Is it just the driving force of hormones? Maybe that’s all love is. What’s in it for the hen? Once the chicks hatch, she will spend one, two, up to three months devoted to them. Then they leave her, she leaves them, either way she doesn’t benefit after that. They don’t dote over her after they are raised. They don’t bring her presents on Mother’s Day or take care of her when she gets old. Since she personally doesn’t benefit, you might say that a hen’s love for her chicks is greater than that of a human’s love for her children. After all, most human parents receive many benefits in return for the love they shower on their children. Many of their children provide plenty of love in return, even caring for their parents as they age. A hen can never count on that.
You need vibrant eggs for a hen to incubate them into chicks. When you buy eggs from a man and his hoe®, you know you are getting very vibrant eggs. My eggs are not dead things. They are very much alive. All it takes is three weeks of gentle heat to turn them into healthy chicks. It’s something we tend not to notice when we buy groceries. Almost all of the things we eat are alive. Any fresh salad is a collection of living plants. If you eat eggs, dairy, or meat, all of those things are the products of living things. And it is love that creates all living things. Love (hormones?) is the driving force which makes things grow and reproduce and grow and reproduce and grow a million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion, undecillion, duodecillion, tredecillion, quattuordecillion, quindecillion, sexdecillon, septendecillion, octodecillion, novemdecillion, vigintillion, unvigintillion, duovigintillion, infinite times. (how many?)
Today is the warmest day so far of this year. Many of you may laugh to hear that it isn’t even 60ºF (15.5ºC) yet. But it feels like an early spring heat wave for us. The dogs are loving this warm, sunny day.
Chickens are but a part of a man and his hoe®. The 800 garlic I planted last fall are shooting up. Come May, the garlic bed will provide a bounty of garlic scapes to enjoy. Much of this is made possible by all the manure the chicken produce. Every few months, I start a new compost pile. The current one is heating up. Much of this week it has been around 130ºF. It’s a bit cooler today as I thoroughly broke it down yesterday and rebuilt it. It will be hot again tomorrow. A good reference for composting, is The Science of Composting by the University of Illinois Extension.
Every time I turn the compost pile, I’m always amazed at how full of life it is. There are countless tiny creatures as well as billions of microscopic bacteria, fungi, and actinomycetes. Turning the compost pile immediately attracts many chickens. The pile contains a feast for them, and stirring it up makes it easy for them to snatch their favorite things. It’s like a fast food joint for them.
The brooding hen has ten days left before her chicks hatch. Does she have any idea how busy she will be then? What is going through her mind as she patiently waits?
It’s been a cool, drizzly day. When the hens have had enough of being out in the wet, hanging out under the eaves is popular.
At a man and his hoe® chickens have plenty of chances to be alone. It’s early spring, the robins are back and the frogs’ chorus at night is almost deafening. The hens are just starting to go broody, with the first clutch scheduled to hatch around March 26. By mid summer, there will be up to a hundred new chicks running about with their mothers. Now is the time for chickens to have time alone.
In the space where a typical chicken farm will have 3,000 chickens, I have one. In a single hour, a chicken here will walk a greater distance than chickens in most farms walk during their entire short six to ten week lives.
You can either buy chickens which have plenty of chances to be alone, or buy chickens which never experience a single moment on their own.
So what is life like for a mother-to-be hen? Most of the time, day and night, it is sitting quietly on her eggs. She is also gently turning the eggs many times a day. This keeps the embryo centered in the egg and prevents it from sticking to the shell membrane. She also protects the eggs she is sitting on and will keep other hens and predators from getting into her nest. (The squiggly lines on the eggs are ones I drew to mark the eggs she started incubating.)
Of course, a hen doesn’t have a servant to bring her food and water. At least once a day, she has to leave the nest to eat, drink, go to the bathroom, and get some exercise.
Afterwards, she is back on her nest until the next day.
Most chickens are hatched in large commercial incubators. Here at a man and his hoe® we do things very differently.
Even though it is still cool, spring is in the air. The robins are active, calling for mates. The thimble berries and raspberries are budding out. And one of my hens went broody a few days ago. Tonight I placed a full set of eggs underneath her for her to hatch. In three weeks, around March 26, if all goes well, they should hatch.
So what is this bowl of marked eggs for? They are for the broody hen to incubate and hatch. Before placing eggs under a broody hen, I mark the eggs so I can tell later if another hen has added any eggs to the clutch. A broody hen will leave her nest once a day to eat, get some exercise, and do her business. While she is away, another hen may add an egg to the clutch. But such additional eggs need to be removed as they won’t hatch at the same time as the original clutch. By marking the eggs at the start, it’s easy to spot any unwanted new eggs
And here is the brooding hen.
So why go to all the bother of hatching chicks under a broody hen? What chicken farmer in this day and age does this? Wouldn’t it be much cheaper and easier just to use an incubator or purchase chicks from a hatchery?
I do it for the chicks and their mothers. In an incubator, the chicks don’t get to listen to their mother’s heartbeat as they develop. They don’t get to hear her soft calls as their hatching day approached. And after they hatch, they get to cuddle and dry out under their mother’s warm breasts, and get to make their first steps out into the world under her watchful. At night they get to sleep under the warmth of her body and in total darkness, not under heat lamps like most chicks.
And the hens, when they go broody, not getting to hatch a clutch of eggs can be upsetting. They will sit and sit and sit until they finally give up after four or five weeks. Some are visibly upset when they spend all that time and end up without a clutch of chicks to raise. Many hens have a strong desire to hatch and rear chicks. Talking about a sense of fulfillment with chickens is perhaps a stretch, but when you watch a mother hen worrying about and carrying for her chicks, it is so endearing. Instinct no doubt drives this, but when the instinct is this strong, isn’t it wrong to deny its expression?
Modern agriculture has stopped considering the animals it raises as living creatures with feelings and desires. The attitude is to do whatever will produce the most eggs and meat at the lowest cost possible. But do you really want to purchase eggs and chicken from producers who have such little regard for the animals under their care?
A pair of fearless guard dogs are a necessity when you are raising free-roaming chickens. You need vigilant ears, eyes, and noses on the lookout for coyotes, eagles, and hawks. They look like they are snoozing and not paying any attention. But at the slightest whiff of danger, these two are on their feet and charging after any approaching danger.
These chicks are two and a half months old now. At times they are quite independent, but they still stay close to their mother and roost with her at night. The other night I couldn’t see the white one, until I peered closely at the mother’s feet, and saw the chicks feet between her mother’s. She was roosting underneath her mother.
We are in the wet season. A steady rain all day doesn’t stop the chickens from being outdoors most of the time. Even when they get soaked, like Billy the rooster, they seek cover only when it is pouring rain.
All the chickens at a man and his hoe® enjoy a full life, experiencing all kinds of weather, and enjoying the protection of two loyal dogs. It’s what chickens deserve.
The news is full of articles about raising the minimum wage. There’s no question that workers need a reasonable minimum wage in order to buy the things they need to live. Animals are no different. Now chickens have no use for money. They are not going to take a bill full of dollars and walk to the store to purchase things. However, they still deserve something of value in exchange for the eggs they provide. And what is amazing, is that the more you pay them in the way of space, pasture, and brush, the more they reward you with higher quality eggs.
The next time you purchase eggs or chicken meat, ask your grocer what sort of wages the chickens which laid those eggs receive? How much space does each hen have? How many acres of grassland do they have? Do they have roosters they can flirt with?
In the pictures below, I’ve listed a number of things I consider should be part of any chicken’s compensation package.
The relationships mother hens have with their chicks can be rich. Watch hens interact with their chicks, and it’s clear that chicks need their mothers.
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Life is full of challenges. Things are always changing. Nothing stays the same. And it’s as true for chicks as it is for us. The Milky Way galaxy we live in is moving at some 1,350,000 miles an hour through the universe. Every day we travel some 32 million miles. From the moment we are born until we die, we are never in the same space, traveling through space at incredible, unimaginable speed. All of us, even the chickens. At times it may seem like nothing changes, but every hour of every day hour we travel more than a million miles. At that speed we could buzz around the earth more than 50 times in an hour. So the next time you are in a difficult situation, close your eyes and remember that in an hour you’ll be more than a million miles away from where you are now.
Yesterday evening was a traumatic time for these chicks. Their mother decided it’s time to start roosting again after sleeping with her chicks in a small barn for the last two months. Two of her chicks followed her up to the roost. But the other two couldn’t understand why she wasn’t in their bed. So they spent the night huddled together, wondering where their mother had gone.
Today, they are all together, following her around through the pasture and woods. Maybe tonight, they will all figure out that their mother is roosting with the other grownup chickens and join her and the other chicks on the roost.
It won’t be long before they have an even more traumatic experience, when their mother decides that her mothering time is over and shoos them away when they want to follow her around.
Broiler raised chickens never have to face this ordeal of growing up. Broiler and most farmed chicken never have a mother to contend with. So they never have to confront separation anxiety. Then again, most farmed chicken, broiler-free range-pastured never live this long.
Note: The egg you see under the chicks is a wooden egg. I keep wooden eggs in the nests I want the hens to use, to encourage them to lay there. Hens prefer to lay eggs in nests where there are other eggs.