One of my colleagues, who keeps a thousand hens and supplies local shops with eggs, told me that the way to cure broodiness in a bird is to put her in a draughty pen for a few days until she gets bored.
Regular readers will know that we've been struggling with a
broody hen recently but the hen in question ran away.
Before she ran away, I confined her to the makeshift coop. I was quite pleased with the design - puppy pen, beer crates, tree stakes - but the hen was not impressed and managed to knock the stakes to one side and escape, even when I put a layer over the top. After two escape attempts and being locked out of the hutch for a day, she high-tailed it off somewhere.
So if anyone wants to try the same, I suggest that you attempt a more robust design than the one you see above.
The good news though is that the hen did eventually return when her little bird brain forgot that she was mad at us. But she's still sitting in the coop on the plastic eggs!
