Recently though, she was very broody.
If you aren't familiar with the term "broody," my son would be happy to demonstrate. To show you, he would pretend to squeeze into a nesting box and squat down, then shut his eyes tight like his making his most desperate wish and say, "Me way wants baby chicks!"
And that is what a broody chicken does. All day, every day. She is a chicken with baby fever.
At first, it was really quite pathetic. She just sat in the nesting box all day, trying to keep her eggs warm. The thing was, though, there were no eggs under her. And even if there were, they wouldn't have baby chicks in them.
I felt kind of bad for her. I'd been there before (well, figuratively, I've never actually squeezed into a nesting box) and I tried to have a woman-to-woman, er, woman-to-hen talk with her. And on and on she sat.
GD tried next, caressing her and telling her "You is not a mommy," over and over again and then lovingly picking her up and toting her around the yard under his arm.
Day after day she sat, trying to hatch her invisible eggs.
I briefly considered playing chicken matchmaker and seeing if our neighbors would let us borrow their rooster to set Watermelon up on a date. But the more I thought about it the more I just felt like it was a weird idea.
After a while we realized that our gentle counseling was getting nowhere with her and I started to just unceremoniously throw her out of the coop while my son would get in her face and try to reason with her, "You can't have baby chicks! We don't have a rooster!"
After two weeks of this behavior we had to do something. Her permanent residence in the flock's favorite nesting box was messing with the egg-laying mojo of the other hens.
So we put her in the cage of shame.
My husband read that the cure for broodiness is to put the chicken in solitary confinement. The article, he said, specifically stated that this would not offend the chicken.
Watermelon felt otherwise when we sentenced her to some alone time in my old parakeet cage.
Forty-eight hours she spent in that cage. My husband said She was supposed to remain in confinement until she laid an egg but we took put on her and let her out early.
She squawked at us and went on her way, back to her chickenly life, still slightly confused but no longer acting on her desires for a family.
I really hoped to come to some profound conclusion from this experience. I racked my brain for some sort of inspiring life lesson, spiritual application, or even just a motivational take-away. But aside from a preschool version of the birds and the bees of chicken husbandry, I got nothing.
I just hope that my sons' future wives don't receive the same treatment when they decide they want to start a family.
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