Mind the brood
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01Why they follow at all
Chickens hatch precocial — eyes open, down dry within hours, walking and pecking on the first day. They are not helpless the way a blackbird's chick is helpless. What they lack is any idea of what is safe, and they get that entirely from their mother.
In the first day or two a chick fixes on the first large warm thing that moves and makes the right noise, and afterwards it treats that thing as mother. The hen helps this along from inside the shell: she talks to the eggs for the last few days before they hatch, and the chicks answer through the shell. By the time they come out they already know her voice.
After that the following is almost automatic. A chick separated from the brood gives a thin, rising distress call; the hen answers with a low cluck; the chick walks at the sound until it finds her. Ten metres of yard and a lot of grass make no difference. They navigate by ear.
02What a broody hen actually does
Going broody is a switch, not a mood. A hen that flips it stops laying, sits in one nest, and stays there. Lift her off and she flattens, puffs up to roughly twice her width and growls — an unmistakable sound quite unlike anything else a chicken does.
For three weeks she leaves the nest perhaps once a day, for a few minutes, to eat, drink and empty herself. She turns the eggs several times a day with her beak, shuffling them from the middle of the clutch to the edge and back so that all of them get the same heat.
Once they hatch her job changes completely:
- She broods them. Chicks cannot hold their own temperature for the first fortnight. They dive under her, sometimes eight at a time, and come out warm.
- She shows them food. Picking a morsel up, dropping it, picking it up again, calling all the while. It is called tidbitting, and it is how a chick learns what is edible.
- She scratches for them. The chicks stand behind her and take what she turns up.
- She watches the sky. One particular sharp call and the whole brood freezes flat where it stands, or runs to her.
Then, somewhere between five and eight weeks, she stops. She pecks them away from her, roosts apart, and goes back to laying. The brood is over as abruptly as it started.
03Twenty-one days
She sits for three weeks almost without moving, and for most of that time there is nothing to see. Held up to a light on the seventh day, though, the egg stops being an egg: there is a dark knot with a web of vessels running out of it, and the whole thing is already turning slowly under her.
A disc of cells on the yolk becomes a head and a spine. Nothing is visible from outside.
The heart is beating, and it beats for another seventeen days before anyone sees it.
Candling works: hold it to a bright light and the embryo shows as a dark spot with veins around it.
Feathers, claws and a beak. From here it is mostly growing, and the egg gets noticeably lighter as water leaves it.
Turning stops. The chick moves head-up under the air cell and lies still, which is why the hen settles too.
It breaks into the air cell, breathes, and starts to peep — inside the shell. Then it pips a ring round the blunt end and pushes out.
04Keeping chicks without a hen
A heat lamp or a heat plate does the brooding instead, and the only real trick is getting the temperature down on schedule. Too warm for too long and the chicks feather up slowly; too cold and they pile into a corner and smother each other.
| Week | Under the heat | What you should see |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 35 °C · 95 °F | Spread out evenly, moving, cheeping quietly |
| 2 | 32 °C · 90 °F | Coming out to eat, going back to warm up |
| 3 | 30 °C · 85 °F | Wing feathers showing, short flights |
| 4 | 27 °C · 80 °F | Spending most of the day away from the heat |
| 5 | 24 °C · 75 °F | Mostly feathered, roosting on anything |
| 6 | 21 °C · 70 °F | Heat off in a mild week |
The chicks are a better thermometer than the thermometer is. Huddled in a heap directly under the lamp means cold. Pressed against the far walls, panting with their beaks open, means hot. Scattered about the floor doing chick things means it is right.
05How big a brood gets
A hen can only raise what she can cover. The limit is not how many eggs she will sit on but how many chicks fit underneath her on a cold night, which is why a bantam with fourteen eggs is a bad idea and a bantam with six is a very good mother.
How many chicks one hen can cover
Solid chicks are what she will cover comfortably; the pale ones are the top of her range.
Most of what a hen does with her brood she does in the first three weeks, and almost all of it is heat, noise and pointing at food. The rest they work out by following her around.