I've enjoyed the comments and input from various readers, who have asked about and shared their experiences with allowing various types of birds to hatch and brood their own young. Whether you're doing this for the educational experience, the economics, to fly under the radar of NAIS, or purely for the entertainment value...hatching your own baby birds is a wonderful experience and I highly recommend it. But the unfortunate reality is that many good egg layers don't make good nest setters. And many good nest setters don't make good mothers. With broodiness and mothering instincts having been so aggressively culled by commercial hatcheries, it's remarkable to find a bird that can both hatch and successfully mother her own young.
One answer that we've found to this problem: adoption! Unlike larger mammals, mother birds are not terribly particular about which babies are "theirs." A good mother hen will look after and brood any chicks she can get her wings around. We saw this happen frequently in Illinois, when on occasion we had multiple brood hens in the barn at the same time. It was actually fairly amusing to watch as days passed, and the brood of the less interested hen gradually shrank while the brood of the more aggressive/interested hen gradually increased. I still remember one hen that ended up with something like eighteen chicks streaming across the yard with her (which was actually too many --- even she couldn't keep track of that many chicks, and they kept getting lost. And I kept venturing out to help, because there's nothing quite as forlorn as the peeping of a stray chick stranded in the tall grass).
We've observed something similar with ducklings. We've had several ducks of various breeds successfully hatch a nest of eggs, with even greater variability in mothering ability. The Muscovies have been by far the best setters and mothers, with Cayugas a close second. The Khaki Campbells are not bad at setting, but we have yet to see one successfully mother her hatchlings. Every Khaki that has ventured off the nest with a brood has quickly lost every single duckling. Khakis don't look back to see if the ducklings are keeping up, and they don't respond to distress calls from little ones who have fallen behind. We got to the point where we would immediately remove any ducklings a Khaki hatched, and either give them to a mother Cayuga (assuming we had one with new ducklings) or brood them ourselves under a heat lamp.
BTW, I don't say any of this to diss Khakis or Muscovies: they have their place, and Khakis are extremely good egg producers. We had a lot of Khakis when we were producing duck eggs commercially in Illinois, and at one time had a good flock of Muscovies. But we've chosen Cayugas as our primary homestead duck because their egg production is respectable, they are good natural setters/mothers, and they get to a nice eating size. We ultimately decided against Muscovies in part because the females are too small to make much of a meal, but also because Mrs Yeoman Farmer thinks those "caruncles" the males have on their faces/heads are disgusting to look at (not to mention the bizarre social behavior that Muscovies engage in when they're together in groups. I still keep a few Muscovies, just for fun (and where MYF doesn't have to look at them), but they're now too old to good for much of anything.
Because adoption need not be limited to the same species! We've had real life "ugly ducklings" hatched on our farm; one of the hens laid an egg in a duck nest when the duck was taking a quick break. Chicken eggs have a shorter incubation period than duck eggs, and the chick ended up emerging along with the ducklings. He/she managed to keep up with the web-footed siblings for several days, but the problem was when Mother Duck took her little charges through puddles. We eventually had to remove the chick for that reason, but it probably would've worked out alright had the mother been a hen and the adopted bird been a duckling. And I bet a goose would be an even better mother to a duckling than a hen would be.
2 comments:
I've been writing 'The Ballad of the Broody Hen' and our experiences with giving a Light Sussex chicken some Barnevelder eggs. It's great fun.
Dear Yeoman farmer, I am reading a book called The pilgrims progress written by John Bunyan, In reading this book I came across a man named oliver Cronwell, "I dont know if you have heard of him" anyway, in his lifetime he said he lived in Yeoman Farmer, which made me come across your website, you have great information.
Thank you
Chinedum Agada
P.S. check out my blogspot at mekhijaylon.blogspot.com
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