My little 6 day old fuzzy butts with their adoptive mom keeping a watchful eye on them.

Did she really adopt them? Great photo by the way!!!

Cute! Silkies are such wonderful little mamas. She just adopted them no problems? Was she even broody? I have one little white silkie girl and I just adore her. She thinks that she's a lav orpie though. We never told her that she was a small, fuzzy white chicken.

Lockdown yesterday! Chicks are due Friday. I'm hoping for an early bird or three.

Thanks. I was glad I had my cellphone with me out there - I got some really cute shots of the babies on her back. I love the interaction.




Yes, she really did adopt them. It was her 1st time broody but we were able to coerce her.

Yay to lockdown! I'm excited for you. We had one incident at the start where she accidentally stepped on one of the chicks and she freaked out and ran away. We put her back in the coop with all the babies and waited to move her down to the broody area after she bonded a little more with the chicks. In the past we've had other hens help out a broody but that hasn't happened yet, but Chick is doing great with all 13. Silkies are such great mommas. <3

tracey_p wrote:
That is awesome!! I tried that with some chicks and my red but she was going to eat the baby so I pulled it. So, the chicken needs to be broody to get them to adopt? It is a good way to introduce and raise the chicks but I don't think my girls have gone broody yet.

Broodiness has been bred out of a lot of breeds. Silkies and Cochins are notorious for going broody & quite often. It's also usually not good to give chicks to a hen the 1st time she's broody. I have had luck before with giving chicks to hens who weren't broody. This is best accomplished if you put the chicks under the hen in the middle of the night. They say a lot of times if no one is broody that you can put the chicks by themselves and a hen will hear their distress calls & adopt them. I, personally, have always done it when I can monitor the interaction for a few hours before bed in case the broody gets mean to the chicks. I have a Cochin who is broody all the time but is terribly mean to chicks. I try every time since she's so sweet to people. It's very strange.

That is awesome:) Thanks for the great info! When the time comes I will try that.

You're quite welcome. There's nothing like seeing the interaction between a baby chick and it's momma. I did forget to mention, for best results, put the chicks under the hen within the 1st 72 hours. The chick bonds with the hen better if put in withing that time frame.

At 9 days their feathers are starting to show their frizzle.