Surprise!

As expected this morning there were seven new little fluffkins cheeping underneath mama hen. The two I'd left pipping the other night had hatched. Eager to get some photos, I bribed her with some scratch grains and while admiring the little crew did a head count.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Hold on... EIGHT? One, two, three, four, fice, six, seven... eight?

My brain mulled this one over. There were definitely seven wyandotte eggs put under her. I'd pulled them out from under Penny and stored them in an egg box inside before putting them under Lily.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Yes, definitely eight. It was early in the morning but the coffee definitely had enough time to have kicked in and it was no trick of my eyes - there were definitely eight. I pulled the empty egg-shells from the pen mulling this over when I noticed that the two "dummy" eggs were one short. For those not familiar, dummy eggs are non-fertile eggs left in the nestbox of a potential broody in order to induce her to go broody. Once she's setting, you remove the dummies and give her some fertile eggs. In my case, Tiger, Lily and Luna had been sharing a nestbox to lay in. I'd left two of those when I slipped in Penny's fertile eggs as she was rather disgruntled with me and I didn't fancy having more pecks. I'd not removed them later as I figured everything had been killed by the heat anyway so I'd just leave all of them to keep her broody until I found some more fertile eggs.

Except apparently it wasn't quite as non-fertile as I thought seeing as how it hatched! It will be interesting to see how it feathers up and see if we can guess who mum and dad are!