A broody hen is a hen whose hormones have told her to stop laying and start sitting. She holds the eggs at her own body heat, turns them with her beak and feet, controls humidity by instinct, and when they hatch she broods, guards and teaches the chicks. It is the oldest method there is, it needs no electricity, and a good broody beats a mid-range incubator for results. The trade is control: she chooses the timetable, not you.
Recognising true broodiness
A truly broody hen sits tight in the nest box day and night, fluffs to twice her size and growls or pecks when you reach under her, has a bare, hot brood patch on her breast, and returns to the same nest within minutes if lifted off. A hen who merely lingers in the box for an afternoon is thinking about it; do not waste posted eggs on a maybe.
Test her resolve on cheap stakes: give her dummy eggs (golf balls do) for two or three days. If she is still welded to the nest, she has earned the real clutch.
Breed matters. Silkies are famous sitters, and many bantams, Cochins, Orpingtons and Sussex go broody readily. Modern hybrid layers have had broodiness bred out of them almost entirely; do not build plans on one.
Setting her up
- Move her at night to a quiet coop of her own, away from the flock. Other hens will climb into her nest to lay, break eggs, and shove her onto the wrong clutch. Moving is the riskiest moment. Done in the dark with her dummy eggs, most hens settle; give her a day or two on the dummies to prove she has accepted the new nest before the real eggs go under.
- A floor-level nest, roomy enough for her to turn, with soft bedding shaped into a shallow bowl. Chicks must not have to survive a drop on day one.
- Food, water and a dust bath within a stride or two, since she will leave the nest once a day, briefly, to eat, drink, dust and relieve herself. That daily break is normal and necessary.
- Treat for mites before she sits. Red mite thrives on a stationary hen. Dust or treat the housing and the bird at the start; a mite-ridden sit fails.
How many eggs
Only as many as she can cover completely with room to spare: commonly six to eight under a bantam, ten to twelve under a large fowl. Every egg poking out from under her spends the night going cold and quietly dying. Set the whole clutch at once, all under her the same day, so the hatch comes together, and mark the set date on the calendar: chicken eggs hatch on day 21.
Managing the sit
Mostly, don't. Check food and water daily, confirm she has been off the nest (a broody's dropping is unmistakably large, which is evidence enough), and otherwise leave her be. Candle the eggs at day 7 to 10 during her daily break and remove clears, exactly as the incubator class describes. If she is sitting in the main coop because you could not move her, mark the hatching eggs with a pencil and lift out any unmarked newcomers each evening.
Hatch and rearing
From day 19, leave her completely alone. She will sit tighter than ever through the pipping and cheeping, and she knows better than you do when it is finished. She may stay on the nest a full day or two after the first chick, because the last eggs are hatching under her and the early chicks live off their absorbed yolk meanwhile. When she brings them off, offer chick crumb and shallow water (pebbles in the dish stop drownings), and let her do the brooding: warmth, foraging lessons and fierce protection are her department. No heat lamp, no brooder, no integration battles later; chicks raised in the flock are of the flock.
Write the set date somewhere you cannot lose it. The commonest broody mishap is simple arithmetic: nobody quite sure which day the quiet eggs stop deserving patience.
The honest comparison
Choose the broody when you have one truly committed, the numbers are modest, and you would rather she reared the chicks. Choose the machine for bigger settings, a timetable you control, or when no hen volunteers. Plenty of keepers run both at once and let the broody adopt the incubator's chicks at night, a trick worth knowing, though it deserves supervision the first morning.