Grafting Chicks onto a Broody Hen

Utilizing the Strong Maternal Instinct of Bantam Hens

A broody Bantam hen is a wonderful thing, but they’re not very big. A tiny hen can hatch up to six eggs successfully, an experienced one sometimes more, but they can raise many more than that, especially if they’re given a helping hand by way of a heat lamp.

Grafting chicks onto a broody hen enables you to boost the size of your chicken flock quickly by hatching eggs in an incubator then grafting them to the hen to raise for you.

If your hen is setting on a clutch of eggs, hatch out additional ones in an incubator. Take the newly hatched chicks and put them under her in the middle of the night or at least when it’s dark.

The hen will usually accept them, and you’ll know this if she purrs at them as you place them carefully under her. Broody Bantam hens are so maternal!

With luck, you can pawn off the job and responsibility quite blithely, knowing that your broody Bantam hen will gladly take it on for you. That’s what they were born for.Sometimes you have two hens that both have small clutches that you want to combine. This will only work if you can do the grafting while the chicks are very young – less than two days old and both clutches should be the same age (within 12 hours or so).

You absolutely must remove one of the hens, as she’ll never give up searching and calling for her chicks, especially if she hears them, and they won’t graft to their adoptive mother.

Give her to a neighbor for a while, or put the maternal hen into a distant pen.

I don’t have the heart to do this to the poor hen, and I would probably let both of them raise their own broods.

On other occasions, you may have a hen with chicks die. Then you have to raise them, but much easier if a hen can do it, so the same method applies. Even if they’re a little different in age, try to graft them anyway. Do I need to say this? The hen must either be broody, or have her own chicks.

Always move the chicks at night, I can’t stress this enough. Hens may kill a chick if it won’t do as it’s told, or she suspects that it’s an interloper. Grafting them at night when she's drowsy prevents this from happening and she wakes up in the morning, a proud new mama hen.

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