One of the Speckeldies has gone broody. She's been like that for a week or two, sitting all day in the nesting box, and scuttling furiously back to it if lifted out at the start of chicken exercise time. It seems a waste for her to spend all her time sitting in a tiny box in the dark, and not what all those animal welfare campaigners worked for, but it's her choice. Except that it isn't, of course, she is captive to her hormones. Women may justifiably grumble that they have a rough time, what with menstruation and the menopause, but try being a hen. Your life is not your own.
It made things tricky this morning when I came to clean out the chicken house. Most of the time I just clear the old litter off the roosting board under their perch, and replace with fresh sawdust, but every now and then the whole house needs doing. I was going to clean it yesterday, but doing the bees took so long with so little success, I couldn't face cleaning the hen house afterwards. Broody sat in her nesting box glaring at me while I cleared four bags (four bags!) of sawdust out of the main body of the house, daring me to come near her. I made reassuring noises every now and then in case she was scared, but she wasn't afraid of me, just hormonal and very cross.
Broody hens do get awfully irritated. I don't know if it would be better if the eggs were fertilised, and I didn't keep taking them away, and she could hear the developing chicks cheeping inside their shells and know that she was getting somewhere. Perhaps it's the frustration, the sheer pointlessness, of having to start again every day with a couple of new eggs that never come to anything before the chicken keeper comes, hauls her off them, and confiscates them. Or maybe broody hens are essentially bad tempered. When we say that human beings are brooding about something, it doesn't imply obsession in a good way. The other hens find her glooming presence in the nesting box quite off-putting, and have taken to making impromptu nests in the sawdust in the main house to avoid her, when they need to lay.
After I'd changed the sawdust in the main house and on the roosting board it was time for the final act, to change it in the nesting box. Given that we are going to eat those eggs I'd like them to be laid on clean sawdust. I gently lifted her through the door of the nesting box and into the main house. She turned round and tried to come in again, grumbling. I fended her off with my gloved hand, which she pecked. I began to shovel the old sawdust out of the nesting box and into a plastic bag to put on the compost heap, while propping the hinged lid of the nesting box open with my head (this is a design omission. It could do with a cleat on the side of the house so that I could tie it open. We always tie the opening sections of the roof shut, to stop the wind flipping them up or foxes nosing them open, but we invented that ourselves, it wasn't in the Golden Cockerel book of poultry house designs).
The broody hen made repeated attempts to climb back into the nesting box before I'd finished, while I fended her off between shovelling with my dustpan, which she pecked vigorously. Then she gave up, went and sat on the perch, and began to shriek. You have not heard a bird express irritation until you've encountered a broody with a cob on. Even when I'd finished changing the sawdust and tied the roof back down, she was still sitting on her perch, yelling with indignation.
It's a great waste that we don't want to hatch out a clutch of eggs, but we can't take the chance of them being cockerels. Neither of us would have the heart to kill them, and we couldn't risk ending up with more than one. At the moment we are holding off getting even that, since although they make fine, handsome pets, the hens are so much easier to organise without one, and while so far we've been lucky twice and had sweet natured birds, who's to say that third time round we might not end up with a vicious one? You can tell that we are not true country dwellers. I called at a friend's house once, who keeps chickens on a larger scale, and she pointed to a pen of young cockerels in the back garden. That one's name is Dinner, she said, and that one, and that one. Our cockerels were called Mr Rooster.
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