Peep, peep.

Every once in a while, one of our hens disappears. Sometimes they are gone for good, having become a meal for some local predator, and other times they reappear from a secret hiding place with a brood of cute fluffy chicks. i just happened to find this missing hen, Sunny, setting on a clutch of eggs in the weeds around our compost bin. She was sitting on a ton of eggs!



i knew that she wasn't big enough to hatch that many eggs, so i pulled a few and stuck them under another hen who has been broody for almost two months now. Poor Peepers had been setting without any eggs for so long she must really want to be a mama!



Her eggs were the first to hatch.



When i went down to check on Sunny, she only had one chick out of her clutch hatch. When i checked a bit later i found that she had abandoned the nest. We had gotten a ton of rain during the weekend, and i was worried about them setting out. So i moved the eggs into the coop, where it was dryer and put her and her chick back in there with them and she again began to set.



The kids love to see the new peeps. So, not long after that, we went back to check on her to see if there were any new hatchlings. This is what we saw.

As i was snapping pictures of the hatching chick, a peck hole appeared in the egg next to it, and we heard the faint, 'peep, peep' of a new tiny peep trying to break out. Such an amazing sight to witness.