Going Back To Nature

Janice Houghton-Wallace Looks At Natural Incubation

By late spring or early summer hens that have completed a laying cycle may well go broody and be ready to incubate eggs. Although using an artificial incubator can be time efficient and clearly allows you to hatch a lot of chicks per season, incubating under a broody chicken is still an excellent way of producing new stock.

Hatching good quality chicks does not start with setting them under a broody though. The fertile eggs need to have been produced by healthy, well-fed adults. Ideally, the eggs should come from two different bloodlines which should then produce very robust offspring. Line breeding is often carried out – father to daughter etc., and several top breeders have what are known as closed flocks and are very successful by keeping the breeding ‘in-house’. However, it is not advisable to breed brother to sister, unless there are so few of a particular breed in the country that it is impossible to introduce a new strain.

There are many pure breeds that will provide good broodies but some are better at it than others. Commercial and utility strains have had broodiness mainly bred out of them and although you can have the occasional throw-back that will go broody, on the whole, even if they show signs of broodiness, you run the risk of them not sitting for the required length of incubation, changing their mind and deserting the eggs, or even if they have managed to hatch some chicks, don’t expect to carry on with too much broodying – keeping them warm and caring for them.