In case you are unaware, bantam chickens like Laverne are famous for frequently going broody. Well, they are famous if you are someone who likes to regularly hatch eggs, they are infamous if you want eggs, and don’t want to deal with a chicken who is an emotional wreck for a month or so. Laverne goes broody a lot. Over the years I have simply removed her eggs, and taking out the liner in the nest box, if she actually decides to go broody in the nest box. She has found other places around the house that were very dangerous should a raccoon get hungry.

I can now tell immediately when Laverne goes broody. You see, Laverne sleeps on antlers above the french doors that exit the kitchen on to the back porch. Yes, it means their is a mound of poop every morning, but it also means that quiet chicken noises greet me when I start chores in the dark, which make me happy. When she is not there, she is broody.

Such was the case about two months ago. I took her eggs, but didn’t take the liner. I guess I should explain the liner for those not versed in poultry. God has this awesome plan for poultry when they go broody. It is time to incubate eggs, and incubation takes heat. Blood flow changes in the lower part of the bird so that it is warmer. When I take out the liner in our coop, the bird rests on a screen. The result is a cooling of the body that causes the bird to stop being broody after several days. This time, I didn’t do that.

In fact, I finally decided to let her keep some eggs. At some point after a bird goes broody, she will stop laying eggs. Other birds might go in and lay an egg or two in her nest, and she will happily hatch those, too. They don’t even have to be the same species, although size can matter. Laverne is quite small, and if she tried to lay on two or three goose eggs, they would stick out on the sides no matter how much she tried to fluff out her feathers to cover them.

Flash forward to a few days ago, when I went to collect any eggs that the ducks or geese had left in the coop, and was very surprised to see Laverne on the ground scratching around on the floor by the food making noises of instruction. Those are just quiet little clucking noises that tell others that food has been found. Roosters do it all the time. Her body was all puffed out, and to add to my shock, a tiny chick ran over to face her and learn about the food on the floor. I ran to get Tiffany, and we discovered that there were two little nuggets. I had left her with only four eggs. Obviously these two hatched, one tried but failed, and the other was infertile. It was awesome.

I’ll leave you with the other fascinating feature of how these little chicks are built. They hatched in a nest box that is placed about three feet off of the ground. The opening to the nest box has a ledge on it that is probably two to two and a half inches tall. I can only assume that Laverne lifted them out of the box to fall to the ground, and no one got hurt. Meanwhile, she has taken them out to explore around the coop as far as about 40 feet away, and then taken them back in. Tiffany took an old crate and made a place for Laverne to take her littles in and hopefully keep them from getting squashed by the giants known as geese. So far, so good.