Gladys is our good sitter. She gets broody regularly and will go the distance looking after her eggs. I moved her into the chook tractor this morning so she could sit on her eggs in peace without being bothered by the other hens wanting to have a turn in the nest, adding to her collection. She is sitting on ten eggs. Ten eggs! About two of them are her own, about three or four belong to her daughters and the rest are from the other girls. She isn’t a big hen so she only just gets them all under her, bulging and flattening out, covering them all with her soft warm breast feathers.
The reason she was off the nest was because there was a young lace monitor lizard in there, about two and a half feet long, eating her eggs. It took off when Emma arrived, slipping straight through the chicken wire and bolting off across the paddock towards the forest. Gladys was beside herself and very distressed, clucking away, not going near her nest, unsure if the lizard was still there in the long grass in the chook tractor. We were really worried that she wouldn’t sit again so we quickly cleaned up the broken eggs, moved the tractor onto some short grass and left her alone. And thankfully she went straight back on to the nest.
Later we replaced the wider gauge chicken wire with some stronger dog wire that has a smaller hole, hopefully too small to let the lizard through. Even though we had to be right in the tractor to replace the wire Gladys still stayed on her nest. She is a good sitter. And Emma replaced the two stolen eggs with freshly laid ones from the other chooks.
“I’m grateful that Gladys went back on her eggs.”
(Confused? Look)
1 comment:
It puts me at ease when I hear that chooks, like human women, vary in their cluckiness and ability to go the distance... It takes the guilt factor out of it for those ladies that don;t feel too interested, and those of us who do!!
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