We call her Clucker for a reason

Sometimes keeping chickens around the farm, is akin to raising children.

There are those that are well-behaved, and those who are a bit ill-mannered. Although personalities and temperament aren't always immediately obvious, we dubbed one of our laying hens, "Clucker," because she always has something to talk about.

Clucker is just one of those birds that wants the world to be all about her. She knows that the older, wiser hen, "Blackbird"'s favorite nesting spot is an out-of-the way location under a pile of branches in our woodpile. And for that reason, Clucker takes joy in aggravating Blackbird by just hanging out there.

This results in a great deal of chaos in the yard, because Blackbird is very fussy about where she lays her jumbo-sized brown eggs. In particular, she prefers to not use the nesting boxes prepared for her in the chicken coop.

One night in August, as the girls were making their way to the roost for the night, my husband did a headcount and realized one chicken was missing. Notifying me (for some reason I have been designated the one to locate chickens gone astray) I climbed through the fence into our neighbors' pasture. A few minutes later, I nearly stepped on Clucker where she sat on a nest of about 10 eggs. By this time, it was dusk, and so I yelled for the hubby to chase the chicken into the coop for the night while I picked her eggs off the nest so she wouldn't return there the next day.

For the next few weeks, we occasionally found small nests of eggs in brushy areas around our property. But as the weeks became months, the number of eggs retrieved from the nests inside the coop dwindled to about two or three per day.

Clucker was immediately suspect of holding out on us. Especially after the day I heard her cackling and carrying on at quite a distance from our house. Again, I walked into the pasture, and eventually found she had crossed the neighbors' driveway and was hanging out under a cedar tree. I can't catch Clucker so all I could do was scold her and hope she'd return home. She did.

Two or three weeks later, it was time to count chicken heads perched on the roost as we locked the girls up one night – and there were again just seven birds instead of eight. However, on this night, it was already dark and I wasn't feeling much like beaming a flashlight into bushes and crevices only to surprise a skunk. A second night, our stray chicken didn't return to the coop and stayed in the woods all night.

On the third day, Clucker returned to the yard to eat layer feed but again disappeared. Deciding not to wait for darkness I, the designated search party of one, struck out on foot for the neighbors' driveway. I went to the spot where I had found Clucker carrying on some weeks before, and there she was, determined to be broody on a nest of eggs that were never in a million years going to hatch into chicks. (We don't have any roosters on the place.)

As I reached into the weeds, she jumped from the nest to reveal 14 blue-green eggs whose shells had now been stained by the oak leaves she'd been nesting upon. 

I started filling my coat pockets with eggs. Surprisingly, I managed to get 14 eggs in the pockets of my wool coat, tucking a few more into the front pocket of my hooded sweatshirt. 

As for Clucker, if she were a child, she'd be punished. But being a chicken with a very small brain, that complicates matters. But late this afternoon, I found her in the henhouse, laying an egg in the nest designated for such activity. 

Hope for improved behavior? The photo shows our oldest hen, Daphne, checking out 12 of Clucker's 14 eggs she was holding hostage on the neighbors' property.