The Rooster’s Gotta Go

Common chicken conversation: “Would you like a rooster? Sure, I’ll give it another go.” I have had this conversation many times in the 23 years I have been raising laying hens and four months after that the rooster starts attacking me and then he’s history. No different this time. I really liked this guy too. He’s beautiful though I can’t figure out what breed he is. I will take a photo and post it. I’m going to put him on Craig’s List too.

Roosters do have a place in the chicken yard. There job is to procreate and to protect the hens. The thing is most of the chickens that hobbyists buy these days from commercial hatcheries such as Murray McMurray or Stromberg have had the broodiness bred out of them hence the fertilized eggs do not get hatched. A broody hen is one that wants to sit on a nest and hatch eggs anad she expresses her broodiness by contiually sitting on a nest. It takes 21 days to hatch a clutch of eggs and the hen sits on the nest about 23 hours and 30 minutes a day. She gets off to drink water, eat and eliminate otherwise she is on the nest in a kind of hypnotism. When a hen goes broody she may have very few eggs under her and if you can catch this in the beginning you can put eggs under the hen at night in the dark and she will accept them. We’ve put up to 10 eggs at a time under a hen. Not all will hatch out but most do and it is far better to have a hen raise up and brood the baby chicks than for you to do it in your basement in a giant refrigerator box. It makes a big dusty mess and you have to be on top of their care and feeding several times a day. If I see that one of my hens goes broody after I get rid of rooster boy, I can always get some fertilized eggs from a hobbyist friend, though I probably won’t know what breed they are.

Next time I talk to you about chickens, I’m going to share a story about the chickens we rescued from the egg hatchery near our farm in Washington State. We called them the Auschwitz girls.