expecting!

Before a whole lot of people go crazy, I am not expecting! Our chickens are! (But yes, I put that subject line in anyway just for the response. =)

Anyway, up until a few weeks ago I was thinking how funny it was that in all our chicken years we'd never had a broody chicken. Ever. And then one day I went out to check eggs, rather late, and there was a chicken on the nest. That seemed odd to me. Maybe she was sick?
But she was there again the next day. It slowly dawned on me that she was broody! And boy do broody chickens protect their eggs! Just check out what happens when you try to peek in:


The poor thing was kicked out of the nest by the other birds for several days running because they wanted to lay in the box too. So the eggs kind of piled up under her. I think there are at least a dozen, if not more. You may remember the chickens preferred not to use the other nest boxes in the chicken annex. Jeremy hung up a "privacy curtain" in front of those other nest boxes and voila! They started using the other nest boxes. So now our mean mama is left in peace.

I'm sure it has been three weeks since she went broody. I didn't write down the actual date so it could be more or less. So either she's going to hatch those eggs out any moment now, or we have an infertile rooster. We shall see. But in the meantime, between Jeremy and I, that poor hen is checked on three or four times a day! And she is usually not very happy about it.

This is a rather happy subject for my 400th post on this blog. I'm sure if I'd been blogging more regularly in the last year I would have reached 400 long ago. Oh well. We can only do the best we can do, right?

Keep your fingers crossed that we get some baby chicks - 'cause how cute would that be!? Of course then we'll have to sell or give them away because we really don't need more than 20 chickens!!