broody advice please

[SteevK]

Hi all
there seems to be loads of broody hen advice on the forum, but it all seems to be geared to hatching. I have take some advice but there is a couple of thing I hope you could clarify. One of the girls has gone broody, stays in the nest box all the time, tic, tic, tic whenever you approach etc. I take her out a couple of times a day and point her to the food and water which she has, but only a little. She has lost quite a bit of weight. I have a smaller coop at the bottom of the chicken compound which I have fenced off and put her in, but the little Houdini keeps getting out and back to the larger coop.
I don't have any eggs to hatch, so do I give her a dummy egg to sit on or would that just make things worse. I'm going to try again and put her in the 'quarantine coop' tonight at dusk. Is this best to in sight of the others so she doesn't get isolated/lonely or is that the point. How long does the broodiness usually last.
Thank you all

[Cidermaker]

You need to break your hen from her broodiness, so forget the dummy egg. You want her to forget the idea and the egg will actually encourage her. You need to make a small wire cage and without being cruel try and put her off the idea of sitting on eggs. Put her the bare wire cage inside the coop and evenconsider putting the cage a few inches off the floor.
You obviously need to supply her with food and water and depending on how keen she is, three or four days of confinement should break her of her broodiness. On fine dry days, you can also put the cage outside and let the wind blow through her feathers. Once you've got your broody cage made, you'll find it extremely useful for broody after broody. Good luck.

[SteevK]

Thanks for that Cidermaker.
When you say put her in a bare cage you you mean just that, no straw or sawdust. I have a large plastic cat carrier (20 x 14 x 12 inches, plastic sides with air holes and a grill front), would something like that do, or would it need to be wire.

[Scarlet]

I use a wire dog crate, lifted off the floor with a few bricks. No straw, or bedding you need to get some air flowing underneath her, stop her getting warm. It shouldn't take long in this weather.

[kathyd]

I must admit I 'chickend out' of the broody pen and just let mine get on with it because I didn't mind not having the eggs, and I wanted to see if she looked likely for future hatchings in case we decided to hatch our own. I lifted her out several times a day and let her stay in the main coop, but made sure there were other nest boxes around for the others to lay in if they didn't want to share space with the broody - luckily in some ways she'd taken root right in the middle of the litter tray thingy, so the nest boxes inside the coop were still available for those who wanted them. She stayed broody for exactly 3 weeks, then stopped. The only problem really was that one of the other hens seemed to have a sympathy broodiness phase, and stopped laying for the same period of time as the broody even though she showed no other broody signs! Weird huh? Since then Ms Broody has hatched chicks for someone else, which was lovely to see and has given me the confidence to do it ourselves maybe next year, all other things being equal (and assuming we have a cockerel by then of course, otherwise it might be a bit tricky ).