Learn How to Stop your Hen from Being Broody this summer & save her from extreme heat stress!
What is ‘Broody’?
The term broody means “A hen who wants to become a mother hen will become ‘broody’. She will abandon all her needs and sit on a fertilized egg for the fetus to hatch. Her body’s warm and perfect temperature allows the chick to develop, taking about 20 days to hatch.” –carlislebee
Reasons Why I Let Them Be ‘Broody’
While I don’t let all my hens go broody, I let a couple hatch a few eggs because the chicks are too cute.
This year, I let two of the Isa Browns hatch two eggs. The benefit of letting them raise their chicks is that I don’t have to buy any new chicks, and I don’t have to raise them myself.
“In nature, a mother hen will keep her newly hatched chick very close to her. Chicks need to be very warm and will cozy up under the mother hen for warmth and safety.
She is their protector and teacher. The mother will show her babies how and what to eat while keeping danger away. Pecking at whatever she feels is a threat.”1
I wrote a post about raising baby chicks 🐤 if you don’t have a broody hen to raise them for you here.
Reasons Why I DON’T Let Them Be ‘Broody’
The only reason I don’t let many of them stay broody is because I don’t want any more chickens right now. Having mother hens with their chicks still means I have to feed them separately and take extra time to watch out for them. Until they adjust and are welcomed into the flock, the pecking order can be brutal.
If a hatched chick turns into a cockerel, too many roosters as adults get into bloody fights. Over two years, I’ve had 5 roosters. I’ve learned one is enough.
Roosters fighting is the worst thing ever, and I was constantly having to keep them separated. It was a lot of stress. The best thing to prevent having too many roosters is to not let the hens go broody.
Another reason, is the more chickens you have, the more feed they need. Right now I am currently feeding 23 chickens and it adds up. Talk about ‘Chicken Math’!
Difficulties with Broody Hens
Over the years, I have learned that hens go broody in the summer. It gets really hot where I live and it can be quite dangerous for them to sit in a hot nesting box all day. If they chose to sit on the ground with eggs, it might be a little better.
But because they choose to sit in the nesting box which is high up, they end up getting off the eggs for some feed and water. When they come back, they sit on different eggs entirely. So I can never keep track of which eggs are being developed. This is when I need to do the candle-light test on each egg before cracking them open.
*Next time, if I let a hen go broody, I will train her to sit on the eggs on the floor of the coop, or in a safe spot, so she doesn’t get confused about which eggs she is hatching.
Egg-Eaters
The other thing that happened this year is that a hen was sitting on 5 eggs and when 1 hatched, she abandoned the other 4 that were almost ready to be hatched. 🐣 I was left with 4 eggs with living chicks inside.
So, I put them under the other broody hens who were not doing a good job at staying on the same eggs. So of course, they left these 4 eggs ready to hatch at the mercy of the egg-eaters.
Magpie wild birds like to fly into the coop and peck at our eggs and eat the yolks. A couple of hens do the same. I believe this is what happened to these eggs because they were nowhere to be found. I can’t quite wrap my head around this issue.
Opening a Fertilized Egg
Turns out, I didn’t candle-test one egg in particular and brought it inside to eat. When I went to crack it, it was super hard to crack. That should’ve been my first sign something was in there. The next sign was the white membrane was very thick and hard to break. This should have all indicated that a living chick was inside.
Thinking the chick inside was dead already, I opened it and saw a moving baby chick. I was so sad because it was then that I realized what I just did. All the confusion from the broody hens led to this moment.
Moving forward, I have some tips so this doesn’t happen again:
How to Stop Your Hen from Being Broody
In my video above, I list three different ways that I have found to be effective in breaking the broody cycle:
- Locking them in a dog crate for three days with food and water
- Dunking them gently in cool water
- Moving them away from the coop to a portable net area
Instinctually, chickens need to sit on eggs, and it is hard to break this if they are around eggs a lot. Mainly, you want to distract them from seeing eggs at all costs. I had to put one in the ‘chicken prison’ aka the dog crate with water and feed for three days until she finally moved on.
When spring arrived, I had to put this same hen in the portable netting system with my newer flock of Isa Brown chickens. This worked until summer came.
I discovered that placing them in cool water helps cool them off but doesn’t break their broody cycle entirely. So depending on how many dog crates you own, this is your best bet.
Good Luck!
Let me know if this worked for you, or share your tips on breaking a broody hen!
- https://carlislebee.com/diy-chick-brooder-build-plan/ ↩︎
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