One Proud Mama Chicken

Our little Silkie Bantam hen, aptly named Silkie, has wanted to be a mama for a while now. Over the past year, she went broody about four times, and never at a really good time of year for chicks. We kept taking her eggs because we needed them to eat, but that didn’t stop her a bit. She just sat right down on the other hens eggs with ruffled feathers and surly pecks at any hands that came near to collect them. She didn’t care whose eggs they were, she was going to hatch out some babies! Sometimes we worried about her when she was broody for a while, not eating, just sitting and looking rather melancholy. Eventually with some cracked corn and coaxing, she always came back around, but we did have one bantam hen give up and die once after a long stint of un-successful broodiness, so we worried about this determined little bird.

Last month, when Silkie went broody again, I said the heck with it, and let her sit on four eggs. I’m not sure whose eggs they were, or what sort of odd breed they would turn out to be with the chicken menagerie we have around here, but Silkie didn’t care. She was going to be a mama chicken.

This morning when my son went out to feed the chickens, he found this little face peeking out from under her ruffled feathers. Two chicks had hatched and two more were working on it. Silkie was just sitting there looking proud as a mother hen can be, clucking away and puffing out her soft white feathers. I moved her and her brood into a big dog carrier with food and water to keep the chicks safe from the bigger chickens until they got a little farther along in life. From the looks of it, she’s got a Black Australorp chick and an Ameraucana, and one of those eggs looks like it came from our White-crested Black Polish bantam, so it will be a surprise to see what we end up with.

Even chicken dreams come true.