My thoughts on broodies and the different groups within our flock

Ebony was very quickly through being broody. My experiences with my seramas being broody is quite different to what it is with Ebony and Flame. I am not including Speckles in this because she has never ever gone broody.

Ebony all done with being broody

The seramas have never been allowed to sit on eggs and have never had chicks so they have no experience. They are going purely on hormones and instinct. Therefore they will sit anywhere.

It doesn’t have to be the nest box they laid their last egg in and in fact in Cinnamon’s case it doesn’t even have to be somewhere where an egg could be sat on. Cinnamon sat on the perch in the chicken shed when she was broody.

The seramas have tiny brains to match their tiny size and there is no logic to their broodiness. They make up for it with their cuteness though.

It is quite different with Ebony and Flame. The breeder uses these girls to brood and hatch his wyndottes. He chose them for their reliability when broody and he told us that Ebony had been a good mother to her chicks.

This meant that when Ebony went broody she had already had the experience. She knew that she needed to sit in what had been her nest box and she needed to sit on some eggs.

At the end of the first day of Ebony being broody I removed her favourite, high, nest box. I cleaned it out, put fresh pine shavings in it and added it to the line of nest boxes on the patio.

The next day Flame laid her egg in a corner of the chicken shed and has continued to lay her eggs there ever since. I remove her egg as soon as it is laid. Ebony showed no further interest in being broody. She has stopped laying but she seems to have worked out that with her nest box gone and no eggs in sight there is no point continuing with being broody.

I am pleased at this outcome because I had thought that if she insisted on sitting either in the nest boxes on the patio area or  in the chicken shed that I would have to leave her to it. She is too difficult to move. She is strong and she has a hard peck on her.

The little girls are so easy to simply pick up but the bigger girls are not so easy to handle, especially when they are angry.

This may mean that I won’t have to worry too much about Ebony and Flame going broody. They are definitely smarter girls and they also have the experience to draw on.

We definitely have three groups within our flock of twelve. I have always found that the girls that come in together tend to stay bonded together. I bought Ebony and Flame into the flock separately, five days, apart. This was to stop them being a bonded pair leaving Speckles on her own after losing her close, flock mate, Emerald.

It worked well as the three bigger girls are all equal and hang out together. Dandelion and Cinnamon hang out with them too because they have been around Speckles for a long time. They have seen girls leave the flock from before they joined the flock and from after they joined the flock. They seem to accept Ebony and Flame as part of Speckles group and these five girls are often hanging out together. As I have found in the past it has nothing to do with size.

These girls make up one group

These two girls are always together

The silky girls came in together and perhaps losing Blue from their trio has made them even closer. They are totally inseparable.

These girls stick together

This is the biggest group I have ever bought in at once and they are a very close group.

I wonder if the three groups will always stay like this. They all get on together with no more than the usual, pecking order, chasing from time to time but when it comes to hanging out together they are definitely three distinct groups.