Don't count your chickens before they hatch!

We've been watching a hen sitting on a clutch of eggs for a while now - 22 days to be exact.  Since I began counting the day I found the nest, it is safe to say that most of the eggs in the nest are older than 22 days.  I lifted myself up to Sally sitting on the nest and listened.  I didn't hear a peep - literally.  This is not a good sign considering that chicks hatch out in 21 days.  I think it puts an exclamation point on the end of the old adage, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch!"  That's a saying that means don't assume you're going to get something until you actually have it.


Sally Hennypenny on her nest in the loft

Sally doesn't understand, but her eggs aren't going to hatch.  The poor old girl would sit on them forever, being hopefully optimistic that they'd hatch.  But they won't.  In fact, they're beginning to smell.  I reached up to grab her and she fluffed up her feathers, squawked and pecked at me.  I lifted her off her nest and put her on the ground.  Here is her nest:


Six very smelly, rotten eggs.

I picked up the sulfurous smelling eggs, putting them into a bucket with hay, handling them like I would imagine a bomb squad would handle a ticking time bomb, knowing full well that breaking one of these eggs would unleash biological agents equivalent to those found in the arsenals of Middle Eastern dictators.  I carried them to the garden, dug a hole and buried them.  Six weapons of mass destruction effectively disarmed.  Whew!


Peeeeeyeeeeewwww!

As you can see, they never formed.  None of them had chicks in them.  So what happened?  Why did she not hatch out any chicks?  I have several theories, but I'm not ashamed to say that I really don't know.  One theory is that maybe the eggs weren't fertilized.  This would be probable if you don't have enough roosters on the flock.  I've read that you need one rooster for every ten hens.  We've got that ratio, so it seems improbable that the eggs weren't fertilized.  Unless, of course, our macho roosters are infertile. What else could be the problem?

Well, when you incubate eggs in an incubator, and we've done that several times, you've got to make sure that the humidity is right and the temperature is right.  I would assume that the same holds true for hens sitting on eggs.  The ideal temperature is 100.5 and the ideal humidity is 60% in an incubator.  Now, we never have to worry about the lack of humidity in Louisiana, but on most days it exceeds 60%, so this could be an issue that caused the hatch to fail?  Not sure.  The heat during the period Sally was sitting exceeded 100.5 degrees Farenheit many days, especially considering Sally that laid the eggs in the loft of the barn and three feet above her nest is a corrugated tin roof radiating heat like an oven.  Poached eggs, anyone?

I think it is safe to say that I don't know the reason and I'm thankful that I didn't count my chickens before they hatched and ordered 31 pullets instead of counting on the potential chicks under Sally to be 2013 egg producers.  One more thing, as I was in the loft removing the eggs from Sally's nest, look what else I found (doggonit!):

Another nest!

I gathered these, though.  No one's sitting on 'em.  They just find creative places to lay and gathering eggs remains a daily Easter egg hunt.  In some of our egg boxes, I've placed ceramic and wooden nest eggs.  They look and feel just like real eggs.  In the picture below, the center nesting box has a nest egg in it.  It is the dark brown one right in the center of the picture.  This particular one is made of cedar wood.  We have some ceramic ones as well.

Nest eggs are used for two purposes.  The first is to train your pullets to lay in a particular area.  You can buy fake ceramic eggs from the feed store.  When your pullets get ready to start laying, you put the fake egg in a nest box and that fools them into thinking that the boxes are a good spot to lay their eggs as well.  Hopefully this will save you from hunting in numerous places for eggs.

There is a second purpose for placing these fake eggs in the nests - Chicken snakes!  Chicken snakes, or rat snakes, are harmless snakes, BUT they are humongous and will scare the ever-livin' daylights out of you.  They will eat your eggs and then go rub up against something to break the eggs they've swalled in order to digest them.  The idea of the fake eggs is that the snake will eat the ceramic or wooden egg and it will end up killing him as he won't be able to digest the fake eggs.  Now, I'm just as generous as the next guy, but I think a snake needs to earn his living honestly and not steal our eggs.  They also eat rats and should be eating rats instead.  

Poor old Sally.  She worked hard, showed persistence, exhibited tenacity and was faithful to the end - traits we should aspire to possess.  In the end, it didn't work out for her.  But judging by her resolve in the picture below, I think she'll live to fight another day.




If at first you don't succeed... try, try again!