Mean Chicken Is A Mother!

Background for those who may not have read the previous post.

1. Mean Chicken was attacked by a dog several months ago and we almost lost her but we managed to nurse her back to health, though she is still missing a few feathers.
2. Mean Chicken is  a red hen and she lives with 11 other red hens . . no roosters.
3. Mean Chicken decided . . hmmmm . . about 21 days ago that she wanted to be a mother.
4. Since there is no rooster with them, her eggs would not hatch but that didn’t stop her from trying.
5. I gathered fertile eggs from our Dominique chickens (two hens and one rooster) and from our Silkies (three hens, one rooster and 2 fairly young chicks) and I put those under Mean Chicken.
6. Mean Chicken got her name because she’s a mean chicken!  She growls at me but she’s actually not as mean as the other mean chicken.  Mean Chicken will not bite me and the other chicken does.

So, I gathered eggs from the hens who do have roosters with them and I wrote the date on the eggs.  The Dominique hens don’t lay every day so it took me a while to get several eggs.  Same with the Silkies because at the time, I only had two laying hens and one of them was on a nest so she wasn’t laying.  I ended up accidentally cracking two of the Dominique eggs over the last few weeks so they had to be thrown out and Vince gathered eggs one day and accidentally brought in an egg with a date on it.  It was the next day (after spending the night in the basket in the air conditioned house) that I noticed it so I threw it out so she’s three eggs short but she still has plenty!

Because Mean Chicken steals eggs from my other laying hens, several times a day when I go to get eggs, I have to lift her up and take out all the eggs that don’t have dates on them.  It’s fairly easy — the eggs the red hens lay are huge.  The Dominique eggs are decent and the Silkies are bantams and their eggs are tiny.

Yesterday morning, as always, I lived Mean Chicken up, checked all the eggs under her and got out several that weren’t dated so I knew they were fresh eggs.  Look at her . . all puffed up at me.  She knows the routine but she doesn’t like it.

It takes about 21 days for the babies to hatch and I was thinking we might have one hatch today or tomorrow.  I wasn’t expecting to find one yesterday but when I lifted her up, there was a little Dominique baby chick!

I’m so hoping it’s a hen.  The little dot on the head is well defined, which is indicative of a hen, but there’s also a little “frosting” behind it which may mean it’s a rooster.  Time will tell.  I’m not going to get my hopes up for a while.  A hen can stay, a rooster probably cannot.  The Dominique roosters are huge and my red hens are small . . he would be too rough on them.  For now, I’ll enjoy this cute little chick but not get too attached.  Here’s a link about sexing the babies that a reader sent to me when we first got our Dominique chicks.

This is the dad back before he grew up completely.

Vince asked me if I thought Mean Chicken knew they weren’t really her babies.  No . . she doesn’t have a clue and even if I told her, she wouldn’t care.  She’s so happy to have a baby that she can call her own.