Well, I’m back with another “chicken” question. Two, actually. :-)
I’ve so far been unable to procure any Buckeye hatching eggs or chicks at a reasonable price, BUT, we have that broody hen, so...
Per the suggestion here, I was looking on eBay for Buckeye hatching eggs. Instead I found a local* seller of Black Copper Maran hatching eggs**, who agreed to sell me 6, and agreed to local pickup, which saved a lot of $$. When I got home I found the seller had actually given me a baker’s half dozen (7) eggs. Gotta do that A+++ feedback today!
I swapped in the Maran eggs, went off to put the already developing “mutt” eggs that had been under the hen into our cheapy little incubator, and our rooster who had earlier been merely a bit protective of the hen attacked the hen and eggs and broke two eggs B4 I could intercept! So he’s screened off, now. Aggghhh...!!!
Has anyone ever had this happen? Apparently the rooster somehow knew the Maran eggs were not his progeny. He was clearly not trying to mate - he was trying to force the poor hen (about half his size) off the remaining eggs.
The 2nd question is that the remaining eggs had broken eggs’ content on them, some of which had already dried. One at a time I washed that off under warm (not hot) water, thinking that otherwise the eggs would not “breathe” properly. Was that the right thing to?
* “Local” as in only about 20 minutes out of my way when traveling to go help out with my Mom. But in actuality a bit over an hour away from here.
** Really nice, big, dark (for chicken eggs) brown eggs. I am hoping that the game bird in these will help with predation of mice & young rats, once the Marans are grown. Plus the eggs look great & should be an attraction for selling if we do more of that. (We are down to 9 hens and 4 of those are “mutts”, only 3 are really good layers.)
*** The bad guy rooster is an Amberlink / Easter Egger mix - very colorful and handsome roo’ that looks almost like some sort of hawk - seems to help with scaring off actual hawks! But he’s normally gentle for a rooster. We had one previously who’s feathering / color looked almost like a bald eagle. :-)