Hello, thanks to everyone for all the great help on my last post. Helped a ton. Now, another situation from this city-boy about my chickens. I'll try to be as quick as I can.
Had a chicken sitting on three eggs. About two weeks into her sitting on them, other chickens got up there and added four more eggs to her stack, so she was sitting on 7 eggs.
The first three hatched and 2 survived and are doing great. Momma continued to sit on the remaining 4 with the baby chicks with her in the cage..
Today, one of the eggs that was added later hatched. It appeared very healthy and almost immediately started walking around and crawling under mommy.
About two hours later, the momma killed the baby chick. We pulled out the other babies and have them in a cage by themselves now. So far, the chicks seem to be doing fine.
Why would momma kill the new baby? The only thing we could think of was one of two reasons.
1) the baby was handled to early and my scent got on it.
2) Since there was already babies running around, momma thought the new chick was a threat to the babies and killed it.
Sorry for the length of this post, but we are concerned about the safety of the remaining chicks that will hatch. We don't have an incubator so we are letting the momma continue to sit on the last 3 eggs until they're hatched, should we pull them out right away?
Or, what are your thoughts?
Thanks, Bruce & Kim
Big chickens killing babies. Normal?
how about number three: something WAS wrong with the chick, it would not have made it.
my limited expereince with broody hens this year. so docile two set together and hatched together, and i took out 16 from the incubator for them to raise. well, one had a problem that i didn't know at the time. and they immediately BOTH set to pecking it violently. i brought it in and kept it separate. when it died i had a necropsy done to confirm it was NOT AE, since the eggs came from a swap [i will never again swap eggs]. it is liekly the chick had a brain problem from one time the incubator wasn't right, as he was the only survivor from that hatch in that bator, and it did get quite high once.
so these hens just KNEW, i had to watch and observe and pay out money for testing, and refer to incubator temps to figure it out.
different stage of incubation focus on development of different parts of the chick...
so, these eggs came into incubation under her one week later, anything could have caused a developmental problem, including genetics and nutrition of the hens at the time. your other eggs/chicks may be fine, esp if laid by a hen other than the one that laid the chick wthat was killed.
sounds like she was a good mother, and i can't see any reason she would not accept another chick, but i certainly understand you protecting those just in case. hopefully the rest will go well and you can give them back to her if you would like...
this is just my opinion, hopefully more folks will have one based on their experiences...
tf
I don't know much about broodies and their chicks. This has been the 1st year we have had broodies. We had 2 hatch out chicks at the same time and have 6 still sitting now. of the 2 that hatched chicks, we took the chicks when they were dry for 2 reasons. One was that we don't have a way to keep the babies safe with mama when they leave the nest and the other was because after 24-48 hours after the 1st chick is born mama will leave the nest to show her babies where the food is. This is what I have read. I wanted to give the eggs left to hatch as much time as they needed without being left to die.
I don't think there is any way your mama hen would have killed the chick because your scent was on it. With my broodies.....#1 hatched out the most the fastest and #2 came next. When I was getting the chicks from #2, #1 went nuts when she heard the peeping chicks of #2. To calm her down, I gave her one of #2's chicks for the night and she was happy again.
I have also read many threads where chicks were hatched in the incubator or by another hen and were given to another hen, where the hen adopted them......no problems because of different scents.
I think tf's answer is probably what happened......after all, a sitting hen will roll eggs she is sitting on out of her nest when she 'knows' they are bad. It makes a lot of sense that she would so the same for with a sick chick.
Good luck!
Christy
I agree. Nature has a way of taking care of things that seem cruel to us but that is they way they do it.
I too agree. They just 'know' something is wrong with the baby. More than likely, it would have died later even if mama didn't 'take care of it'. Natures way of Survival of the fittest in ALL ANIMALS. It is only us humans that try to 'fix' them whether it be another human or animal. Just my two cents worth.......^_^