One of my hens has taken to laying her eggs somewhere other than the coop’s nest boxes. This isn’t allowed, for obvious reasons. She has to be ‘broken’ of her attachment to her new nest site, but it has not been easy.
Discovering the Hidden Spot
With autumn underway, we’ve been gathering the early leaves and storing them. When placing a load in the “bin” (made of pallets), there was a shallow depression in the pile and several eggs at the bottom. For a few days, one of the hens had been jumping up into the bin and finding a new place to lay her eggs.
Ineffective Barrier
I figured that if the mystery hen couldn’t get into her secret nest anymore, she would go back to laying in the nest boxes. To keep the hen from getting into the bin, I stapled sections of plastic fencing around the front (the opening). I thought I had been pretty thorough and made things sufficiently discouraging. Not discouraging enough for a determined hen, apparently.
Fowl Persistence
A few days later, while taking food scraps to the compost bin, I glanced over to see a patch of red among the leaves in the leaf bin. Somehow, she got in again. I chased her out and made the barrier more complete. I tried to herd her to the coop to lay her egg, but she was having none of it. Suspecting that she would be back, I putzed down near the bin. Only a few minutes later, she ambled up to the bin. I got to see how she was getting in.
She would fly up and hold onto the mesh with her toes, continuing to flap and climb. When she got to the top (the underside of the ‘roof’ pallet) she fell in over the top edge of the fencing that had sagged down under her weight. I doubt she thought about how she’d get out later. When I chased her out, there were three more eggs in her clandestine nest. Grr. She had been at it for at least three more days.
Flock Lock Down
I didn’t want my wayward hen finding a new secret nest, or teaching the others to nest in the wild. She had to be confined to quarters, so to speak, until the wanderlust faded. The only way to do this, however, meant that all of the flock had to be confined to quarters too.
So, the rest of the hens and the rooster were herded into the coop and run and the door locked. They’ll miss their free-ranging, but the wayward hen needs to re-learn the nest boxes.
We’ll see how well this goes.
Looking forward to the New Adventures of the Chicken Wrangler aka Warden 🙂
Seriously I am interested in how your going to cure this situation before it becomes a flock issue.
The plan thus far is to leave them in lock-down for maybe a week, giving the wandering hen no place else to lay her eggs. I’m hoping this will imprint the nest box as the ‘proper’ place. We’ll see. If she continues to go feral, even after re-orientation, she will get traded to another team. I’ve got five young hens about to come online in a month or two. I don’t need a troublemaker.