Guess what?! I have a broody hen! I've been telling everyone. Haha. I was really on the fence on whether or not I wanted to try and break her broodiness or if I wanted to let her hatch some eggs. Well, I decided! I decided to let her be broody!
There's some benefits of letting your chicken hatch babies, mostly because you wont have to take care of the chicks! Because of this, I decided it was a good time to add a couple new breeds to my flock. I asked around my local FB chicken groups if anyone had any fertilized eggs from Olive Eggers or Black Copper Marans. Lucky for me, someone in Bend had BOTH. Yippee. I picked up the eggs yesterday!
I feel bad that I had to wait so long to get the eggs for her to hatch. She's been broody for a whole week now. But people's chickens are not laying reliably right now due to the smoke in the air from wildfires in the area. I was going to get 3 Olive Egger and 3 Black Copper Marans eggs, but ended up with 4 OE and 2 BCM eggs. Let's hope I end up with all girls. (doubtful, and not the way my luck runs, ah well haha)
BUT THEN. Now, this is very exciting. I was going to give her the hatching eggs last night but decided I wanted to hatch a couple of my own chicken's eggs. Especially some of Lady's eggs. She's a very friendly chicken, and pretty cute... So... I wanted a couple of her eggs.
Look at that gorgeous dark brick colored egg! That is one of the Langshan's eggs! I HAD NO IDEA. I cannot believe I didn't know how dark of eggs they laid! I did all my research but, never thought to look up a PHOTO OF THEIR EGGS (amateur!). Everything I read just said "brown". So what I have is a beautifully colored egg, it's probably one of the prettiest I've ever seen! This is what I wanted all along!
So, in hopes of getting at least one more Langshan and Easter Egger egg, I held off on giving the eggs to Miss Broody Hen for another day. So, tonight I will be giving her the eggs, no matter if I get another Langshan egg or not.
Edit to Add:
I placed the eggs in the nesting box for Miss Broody! She was up an eating, so I was thankful not to have to push her around. I watched her come back and sit on the eggs like nothing's changed! :) I marked them all, because I will need to know which is which. She will steal any other eggs laid in the area and sit on them. Haha.
Other than my broody hen. My chickens seem to be doing quite well save the smoke in the air. I am really enjoying having chickens way more than I thought I would.
The Faverolles haven't started laying yet that I've found, which is disappointing. I have a feeling I should have a large cache of eggs somewhere on these 20 acres... But I haven't found that yet! I really think the smoke in the air is affecting everyone's chickens pretty badly. I should now be getting eggs from everyone, but I am still only getting up to 5 eggs a day. Some days, less than that. I have 19 egg laying age chickens now...
However, I did get a few funny eggs from SOMEONE that I found on the poop deck. Here's the weird egg, and then the weird egg in comparison to a regular not-weird egg!
Here's a cute video of Lady nesting before laying her egg. I love when she shakes her head to get the shavings off her face. It's so cute how she throws shavings on her back. I wonder why chickens do that? Haha.
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