You Did What to Your Chicken?

As you know, we have chickens.  We had some casualties last year and so we got 3 new chickens in the fall.  We still have one of the originals but all the rest are young.

They just started laying eggs for the first time about a month ago.  It's been great. They are great layers and we are enjoying them.  I did make a cheesecake with them the other day and it was very yellow because the yolks of these eggs are so dark and healthy.  It tasted good but kind of creeped me out in the color.  Oh well.

We noticed at the end of last week that one of this chickens was always in the coup.  She was constantly sitting on the eggs.  Even though we have no rooster, she thought that these eggs were going to be chicks.  She sat and sat and was getting kind of mean.  The technical term is called being "broody".

You can't let her continue to be broody.  She would just get more aggressive and the other chickens would stop laying eggs. We looked around and found a couple solutions.  The first was to just keep her out of the nesting box and put her in a metal cage.  We don't own a metal cage and didn't really want to buy one.

So we moved onto the second option which is to lower their temperature enough to snap them out of it.  The way you do this is to dunk the chicken in a bucket of water.  Seeing that I hate holding things that flap, Ryan was responsible for dunking the chicken.

He had to do it 3 or 4 times but it worked.  She is back to normal and all is well in the chicken world of our backyard again.

Here is a video of Ryan "water boarding", as we like to affectionately call it, the chicken.