Smoke & Mirrors: An Egg Hoarder’s tale

Or “When the Eggs Started Talking Back”

You might know that last spring we hatched chicken eggs for the first time. Twelve tiny chicks, one-by-one, fought their way out of their thick shells and into the sort of free air of the incubator on our kitchen counter.

Now those chicks are grown up and laying eggs of their own. At least, the chicks who turned out to be hens are laying eggs. The ones that turned out to be roosters were given away, transformed into soup, etc.

Those hens are a variety of colors. And the eggs they lay are a variety of colors.

We have plenty of chickens and didn’t plan to hatch any more this year.

Two hens, however, had other plans . . .

Meet Smoke and Mirrors, two gray hens who are indistinguishable from one another and always seem to hang out together. They are in the far right of the above photo. Incidentally, our cat Ozzie, who is also in the photo, enjoys hanging out with the chickens. They mostly ignore him.

This is one or the other of the gray hens. Your guess is as good as mine.

Anyway, the two decided to “go broody.” This means they hoard eggs and sit on them all day and night and peck at your hands if you dare try to remove an egg from under them.

The funny thing about this duo is that they went broody in the same nest.

Usually they are in a sort of yin-yang sort of position, one facing one way and the other the opposite way. At that point, since Smoke & Mirrors were hogging the prime laying stall, some of the other hens gave up and started laying their eggs other places in the coop, as seen above.

The one in the back is especially good at staring contests. And pecking your hand contests.

Chris and I decided to let them sit on a few eggs and see what happened. I marked 6 eggs with a sharpie to leave for them to sit on.

Over the next few days we found several marked eggs outside the nest where I assume they got shoved out. At first, I briefly wondered if the hens had some sort of innate knowledge that those eggs were unfertilized and weeded them out. But I quickly dismissed that idea. Our chickens at least are not very smart. And, as we soon found out, they aren’t particularly maternal. They just like to hoard eggs and sometimes they do it so enthusiastically that eggs get pushed out of the nest.

It takes an egg approximately 3 weeks to hatch. So we waited and waited. One morning Chris went out to care for the chickens and he heard little chirps coming from the coop. Inside was this little one. The hens weren’t taking care of it so we put it in our brooder with food and water.

So we stopped disturbing the hens (stopped gathering the eggs under them) and waited another couple days to see if any more would hatch. Sadly, we found two dead chicks. We don’t know if the chicks didn’t get water in time after they emerged from their shells or if they got smothered by their overbearing mothers, or if they got attacked by another chicken, or what. But at that point we decided to bring in all the eggs Smoke and Mirrors had acquired and put them in our incubator.

Much to our surprise, those two had accumulated 19 eggs!!

We had no idea how old each of the eggs were so we didn’t know how long it would take for them to hatch, or if they were even fertilized and would hatch at all. You can “candle” an egg to see if a chick is growing inside, but only after a certain number of days of development. Where we didn’t know how old these eggs were, we couldn’t be sure if candling would be a good indicator or not.

Eggs need to be turned 3-5 times a day so the baby chick doesn’t stick to the side of the egg. The hens automatically do this. Some incubators have auto egg turners. Since ours doesn’t have a turner, I do it manually. They need to be turned one direction 180 degrees and then the opposite direction the next time. This is why I wrote an R on one side and an L on the other, to help me know which direction to turn them next.

After a few days they started hatching, one a day. Our son Moses made this compilation video of the process.

The coolest thing is about a day before an egg starts to hatch, you hear chirping. And it’s usually quite loud! It is honestly one of the most pro-life things. The eggs could be solid rocks for all you know. They don’t move or make a sound for weeks. Then suddenly you hear chirps. Hours later the egg starts to rock. Then a tiny chip appears and hatching begins. If you’ve never watched a chick hatch, it’s a long process. Getting out of that egg seems to take every bit of strength and new muscle the chick has. It rests a lot then it tries again. It is very tempting to help the chick. But I’m told that can cause the chick to die. It has to do it on it’s own.

After hours of struggling and pushing and pecking, a tiny, wet, little bit of a thing pops out. It doesn’t look like much to begin with. But after a few more hours of drying, it fluffs up and is ready for water and food and a heat lamp in the brooder.

All in all, ten of the 19 eggs hatched. Two of them are gray.

They are growing fast!

When they get the rest of their feathers, we’ll move them to the “halfway house” that Chris built last year (to the right on the pic below). It allows them to get used to the other chickens and coop life until they are big enough to join the rest of the flock.

Moral of the story: if your hens start hoarding eggs, prepare to be overrun by chicks!

Moses expressed this perfectly in the video below :)