Today I checked in on Boss Lady, our broody hen. As I suspected, she's now sitting on five eggs! Two more than last time I checked. Which I thought was pretty cool. Until I was looking at the photo I took of the eggs. My apologies for the poor photo. It was dark and I used my camera phone, so no flash. You can clearly see five eggs as I'm briefly lifting her up to sneak the photo. But those eggs are tan. Boss Lady is an Easter Egger and she lays blue-green eggs.
I'm left to believe that she's gone broody on someone else's eggs (likely Henrietta - the Barred Rock hen who shares the nest box)... and that the other hen must be sneaking in and laying new ones. In the meantime, Boss Lady isn't laying at all, and since she's gone broody we've only gotten one egg - presumably from Turducken, given it's odd location.
Henrietta is a pretty girl. When she first arrived here she was in terrible condition. A lot of her feathers were missing, and she had big patches of her skin torn away and scabbed over. She looked miserable. The previous owner told me the boy sliked her and were fighting over breeding with her. It took her several weeks to start looking like a proper chicken again. She was the last to start laying, likely because of her physical ailments. And like I said, she's now a gorgeous bird, but she takes gruff from nobody. I've seen Big Red and Sterlight squabble once over Boss Lady, and lately Sterling has been spending a lot of free range time with Turducken. But I've never seen any one of our five roosters every come even close to showing any breeding interest in Henrietta.
So now I'm a little confused. Will we have chicks? It's always possible there was breeding going on while I wasn't looking. I'm not out in the chicken coop all day, and the two silkie boys are in the coop and yard with her all the time. Why is Boss Lady incubating someone else's eggs? I guess we will just wait and see. First hatch date based on when she started sitting should be in 15 days.