The eagle lands on the side of its nest on very top of a big gum tree. She has just ridden the warm thermal draughts hundreds of feet into the air, surveyed the open fields below before diving down onto a rabbit that didn’t have the time to be startled. That unsuspecting rabbit is now lunch to three squawking, dependant eaglets. But they won’t be dependant on Mum for much longer. Soon she will have prepared their last home meal and she will give them a flying lesson they will never forget. One of the advantages of being born so far above the ground is that you have a few extra seconds to learn to fly after your Mum pushes you out of the nest.
In cities all over the world people bring up their children high above concrete streets. As the world’s population increases so does the number of levels in apartment buildings. Spending the majority of your life 100 feet above the ground is common for many people today.
Chickens have a different relationship with the air space above them. Mum chook incubates her eggs in a nest situated safely on the ground. She shows her newborn chicks how to find food by scratching at the ground and she keeps her babies warm and safe amongst her feathers through the night as she sleeps – on the ground. A chicken’s first attempt at flight is to get onto a roost only a few feet up.
With a chicken’s love of the ground in mind, we choose a nesting box on the floor to put a broody chook on some eggs. Selective breeding over thousands of years has altered to laying habits of chickens and the inclination to go broody. A chicken has to stay on a nest for 21 days straight to incubate their chicks. The majority of chickens today are born in a man made incubator. We decided to let one of our hens do what comes naturally to her. But we also did our share of meddling!
Folklore has it that “rounder” eggs produce approximately 75% hens compared to a random 50% from all shaped eggs. So we chose the “roundest” eggs collected in the previous two days making sure we a good variety of colour and size. The hope was that we would get a variety of colours and sizes in all our hens. We also chose a particularly friendly hen to be the Mum.
We put 10 colourful, “round” eggs in a cage next to, but separate from, all the other chickens and put our docile hen on top. As she fluffs and settles down on top the eggs we break the golden rule and start counting. Of 10 eggs, 8 should hatch. Of 8 eggs, 6 will be hens. Perfect! 3 weeks, 6 new baby hens.
The next morning our Mum-to-be was off the nest. No worries, she needs to eat and drink, maybe a quick dust bath and back to work. I open the door and she rushes out of the cage, runs straight to her old nest and jumps the 3 feet up and into the empty nest. We selected the next friendliest broody chook and this time the cage remained closed.
19 days later and we are only 2 days from our mostly female brood of chicks. We check in Mum and she off the nest and up on a roost! How long had she been off them! During Mum number two’s tenure she had broken two eggs and tossed out two others. We put the remaining 6 eggs under a third broody hen in one of the nesting boxes 3 feet from the ground. The eggs felt cold but it was decided we would hope for the best and wait a couple more days. The next afternoon, the potential hatching eve, we found Mum number 4 on our six unlikely eggs. Goldie!
Goldie is not a chicken to be trifled with. Most of our chickens tolerate being picked up and patted, some of them even like it. Chunky is known for going to sleep in our arms. Goldie on the other hand takes offence to being looked at from the other side of the coop. When on the nest she growls, raises her wings ready to strike and she pecks, hard. Of all the potential Mum’s, Goldie was the only hen with the label ‘Anyone but’ before her name. But Goldie was not to be denied.
So on the eve of their birth our chicks are in a nest 3 feet from the ground and under the meanest chicken in the coop. They had been moved twice, abandoned twice and had four different hens sit on them.
Day 21. No chicks
Day 22. No chicks.
Day 23. I have to get these eggs from under Goldie. The pecking was vicious and justified. Two fluffy yellow chicks came out from Goldie’s feathers as I lifted her up. It wasn’t 8 colourful chicks playing around a friendly hen. But it was two more than we’d expected that morning. Before Goldie could consider flying lessons we moved the fierce mother and her two yellow miracles into a nest on the ground. That night we watched as Goldie jumped up to the nest the chicks were born in and back down again, over and over, all the while encouraging the chicks to follow her. Too soon Mum. After more growling, flapping and pecking we got the family of three back into the ground floor apartment.
More City Life stuff
2 homes, 2 potential fathers. 4 mothers.
