A few weeks ago, I wrote about my chicken-and-egg experiment. I had three broody hens sitting on eight fertilized eggs each.
Twenty-four eggs … twenty-four potential chicks.
Turns out if I were a baseball player, my .333 average would be considered pretty good. But like political polls, when you dig deeper into the data, the headline can be misleading.
In my case, I had one superstar, one marginal player, and one total washout. Here is the story.
My super star was Redneck. Redneck is a Marans mix with black feathers except for her red mane – hence, her name. Redneck hatched out seven adorable chicks.
My Rhode Island Red (Thelma or Louise ? – I can’t tell the two apart, so it was either one or the other) was my marginal player. She hatched only one egg. Interestingly enough, she gave up on three eggs after the first week and removed them from her nest. So she sat on five eggs for twenty-one days until her chick hatched.
Gold Finger is one of my three white Ameraucanas. Gold Finger (named for her yellow legs and feet) was the washout. She didn’t hatch a single egg. After a three-day transitional period where she sat on the roosting bar looking morbid, she gave up her broody ways, cleaned herself off, and returned to the flock. She is now out scavenging the yard for worms and bugs and behaving like a healthy free-range chicken.
Why would one chicken hatch out seven of eight eggs?
While a second would only hatch one of eight eggs?
And the third wouldn’t hatch a single egg?
They all were in identical nesting boxes. All fed and watered the same. And from my casual observations they all did the similar things – eat, drink, you know, and sit on the eggs faithfully for the entire embryonic development period.
Here is my best amateur chicken farmer, gumpish guess.
For any one given hen … hatching eggs must be like a box of chocolates … ya never know what you’re gonna get.
Good thing I didn’t count my chickens before they hatched.
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Next Blog Date: June 18, 2012