Backyard Garden with Chickens

Today on the Urban Chicken Podcast, I answer more chicken questions posed by listeners in Session #4 of Listeners’ Q & A series.  The chicken issues being discussed and considered in this session are: 1) understanding “sex-link” chickens; 2) dealing with a bad broody hen; and 3) learning which common yard and house plants are toxic to feed to your flock.

WHAT IS A “SEX-LINK” CHICKEN?

Sex-linked chickens (often just referred to as “sex-links”) are a very common type of egg-layer chicken that is available.  This hybrid chicken is not a specific breed and the practice of breeding sex-links is well worth understanding.  Here is a recent message that I received from one Urban Chicken Podcast Listener in Oregon who wrote to learn more about sex-links.  Here is what Erin emailed me:

Hi Jen!

I still faithfully listen to your podcast each week and enjoy all the great topics.  I have a question for you about 2 of my girls. I have a black sex-link and a golden sex-link chicken and I am curious what the sex-link actually means.  What is their actual breed?  I have noticed that these two girls are my most dependable egg layers.  For the past year, I am quite sure they have each produced an egg every day.  They also have friendly, docile personalities.

Thanks for your great podcast!

Erin

Eugene OR

This is a terrific question!  I suspect that many hobbyist chicken keepers who own sex-links are unfamiliar with the origins of this hybrid chicken.

First it is important to understand that a “Sex-Link” is not a breed of chicken (and likely never will be.)  Rather, “sex-link” is a name used to describe a practice of cross-breeding various genders and breeds of certain chickens to produce particularly colored, hybrid offspring.  More specifically, this cross-breeding practice bears sex-linked progeny whose color and markings upon hatching reveal the chick’s sex. Sex-linked male chicks will have very distinct and different coloring patterns than sex-linked female chicks. The ability to easily sex day old chicks by their feathering is a tremendous benefit to hatcheries which would otherwise be forced to manually sex their chicks (i.e. hire experts who inspect baby chick genitalia bird-by-bird) which is required in most breeds.

The other main benefit to sex-linked hens is that they are hybrids of laying or dual-purpose breeds and so they tend to exhibit enhanced qualities and vigor from their different parentage breeds — more typically referred to as heterosis.  Heterosis, is just a very fancy term for improved or increased function of any biological quality produced in a hybrid off-spring resulting from the mixing of the genetic contributions of its parents.  Heterosis is the diametric opposite of in-breeding; it is strength through cross-breeding.  Consequently, cross-breeding two different egg-laying chicken breeds can produce sex-linked hens who are extremely good egg layers. It is quite common to find sex-linked hens who will  easily produce 300 eggs a year or more.  This would probably account for Erin’s sex-linked hens being her best layers.

There are several different combinations of chicken breeds which can be crossed to produce either Black or Red Sex-link chickens.  I am not going to go through all of those different combinations.  However, one example of Black Sex-link parentage is to cross a Rhode Island Red (or New Hampshire) rooster with a Barred Rock hen.  To produce Red Sex-links, a common example of the cross parentage is a Rhode Island Red (or New Hampshire) rooster bred to a Silver-laced Wyandotte or Delaware hen. (See links below for more detailed information about cross-breeding for sex-links.)

There is one important characteristic of sex-link chickens to keep in mind:  the sex-determining feather colors and patterns is only displayed in the first generation of these crossbreeds.  Therefore, breeding a sex-link to a sex-link will not produce offspring with the gender-distinguished plumage.

My Frida chicken (who is my top hen and the one who’s voice always opens the main segment of the Urban Chicken Podcast’s shows) is a Black Sex-link hen.  Even though she is a mongrel according to the A.P.A., I believe she is beautiful and a really lovely hen.

WHAT TO DO WITH A BADLY BEHAVING BROODY HEN?

The next listener question comes from Corey who shared the following problem with me on the Urban Chicken Podcast Facebook page:

I’ve got a broody hen and that brat changes nests every couple of days, leaving the eggs she had been sitting on. Is that a common occurrence?

I had another hen go broody (that was my first) about 2 months ago and she was awesome, and continues to be awesome with the two chicks she hatched. Hatching via a broody hen seems so much easier than buying an incubator, trying to regulate the temp/humidity and then raising the chicks in a brooder. That first hen/chicks really got me interested in trying to take advantage of these situations.

Now this one [bad broody hen] is driving me nuts. Short of putting her in a cage with eggs, I’m not sure how to keep her on the right eggs.

Unfortunately not all broody hens actually make good mothers.  Whether a hen will perform well as a broody is partially dependent on her breed and partially related to the individual personality of the hen in question.

Corey’s intuition that it is preferable to use broody hens to incubate, hatch and care for new chicks is correct.  Truly, it can be significantly easier to put a broody hen to work than employ a mechanical incubator and brooder to hatch out a clutch of eggs.  This is, of course, limited to scenarios where you are only want to hatch out just a few new chicks at a time.

Before Corey makes any decision regarding this seemingly flaky broody hen, he needs to first due a little detective work.  Is this “bad broody” truly abandoning her eggs every couple of days or is there some other reason she is moving around?  Perhaps she is being tormented from the nest by other flock mates.  I suggest this as one of my family’s very broody bantam Cochin hens looks like a miniature vulture from having all of her head feathers pecked of by other hens who wanted into the nesting box where she set up shop. A first time mother hen (especially one who’s breed is not as strongly developed for the broodiness character as a Cochin) may get bullied off a clutch of eggs.  Trying to discover if there is a reasonable basis for this broody hen’s abandoning behavior is definitely the starting point for Corey.

If it turns out that this newly broody hens is just irresponsible with her clutch of eggs, there are two routes that Corey may take to address this issue.  The first route is to “help” this hen follow through with her broody obligations.  The best way to assist in this situation is to set up a “maternity ward” of sorts (i.e. a dog kennel with a nesting box, food and water) and lock this would-be mother hen up until she gets the job done.  Isolated in a dog kennel with a nesting box full of eggs, there is really nothing else for her to do but set and get these eggs hatched.  where she is locked up by herself in a dog kennel with the fertilized eggs ready for her attention.

The other route is to break this short attention-spanned hen of her broodiness.  The theory behind this approach is that if the hen does not have the wherewithal to finish setting on eggs on her own volition (especially when she is giving up after just a couple of days), then perhaps she does not have what it takes to hatch out eggs.  Some broody hens abandon their freshly hatched chicks.  Some hens, which are particularly ill-suited for motherhood, murder their chicks either in egg (by cracking them open early) or