You Gotta Keep 'Em Separated

To prepare for the hatching of the eggs, we ("we" meaning Dionne) set up a separate enclosure within the existing chicken run---a cage within a cage, if you will. Apparently, other hens might be rough with the newborn chicks and the roosters may flat out kill them. The top level of our bucket nest structure was only held in place by its own weight which made it easy to relocate to the new enclosure, broody hen and all. Below you see the two roosters curious and desperate to get into the restricted area.

For now, our sick (but nearly recovered) hen Chewhair will share this space. In fact, when broody Beach Bunny got up to stretch her legs, Chewhair took over the incubating for a few minutes.

We also got a quick peek at the eggs to see if any were cracked or rotten.


You can see here that we marked them initially to make sure that no new eggs were added to the clutch which would make it hard to track hatchling schedules. We found out that using a regular pencil is better than a Sharpie because the eggs are indeed porous...you live and you learn.