Chicken Jail

This is the second time this summer that a few of our hens have gone broody.  Chicken broodiness is when a hen plucks out all of her breast feathers, stops laying eggs, pretty much stops eating and drinking, and sits in a nest all day on whatever eggs happen to be there - fertilized or not.  Last summer I took pity on our broody hens and let them try to incubate some eggs into chicks. I ended up with lots of broken eggs and four roosters.  No thanks.

Our two poultry prisoners.

This summer, I have no patience for broody hens - they go straight to chicken jail.  Chicken jail means that the hens get banished to the other side of the coop (the backyard side) where there are no nests to sit in.  Instead they spend their days foraging for fallen apples, eating the fresh grass that the rest of the hens can only dream of eating, and generally being allowed to free range through the garden and yard.  I think of it as a white collar prison.

At night I move the hens from their makeshift nests into the barn on the goats' side.
The goats are great hosts and are happy to take in the prisoners for the night.

After four days in chicken jail, their broodiness is cured and the hens are reintegrated back in with the rest of chicken society.  In this case a little tough love does the trick.