Beginners guide to keeping Chickens

I originally had hoped that I would not have to clip my chickens wings but after numerous attempts to stop them flying over the fence I gave in and clipped them. My fence is 4 feet high and a couple of the chickens did fly over for the first 2-3 weeks but eventually this got less and less except for just one of them which got in the habit of flying over pretty much every day. As installing a taller fence would have been costly and not really practical clipping the chickens wings was the only answer.

For the last week or so one of the hens has become broody and is constantly sitting on a nest. I have read a few things about ways you can stop them being broody one of which is to place a bucket or cardbaord box over them for 24 hours. Although I am sure this would not harm the chicken I decided it was not an approach I would like to take.

To try and encourage then hen to snap out of its broody frame of mind I have split the nesting boxes into 3 sperate comparments rather than on large box. This was more for the other hens to esure the broody hen did not put them off. I remove the broody hen every day from the nesting box and try to keep her out as long as posible but as soon as she gets the chance to go back she does. Not sure if this approach will work we will just have to wait and see. If anyone knows a better way of dealing with this please let me know.

I finally managed to stop the hen being broody. Well to be honest I don’t know if it stopped naturally or it was what I did that stopped it.

For about three weeks I had been taking the broody hen out of the nesting box in the morning and putting her the other side of the fence for most of the day so she could not go back in. But of course every evening when I let her back in she raced straight back into the house and sat broody once again.

I assume that every evening this was undoing any good i was doing during the day so after about three weeks i decided to modify the house to add a lock out panel for the nesting boxes every evening.

After 2 days and 2 nights of doing this she is back to her normal self so I think it might have done the trick but as I said earlier maybe she would have snapped out of it anyway. When it happens again I will get a better idea of it’s effectiveness.