A Quick Study in Mother Hens

In just a few minutes, I've learned a lot about momma hens:

• When a hen's biology says it's time to incubate, hatch, and care for chicks, farmers say the hen is "broody."
• Some inner-city chicken keepers aren't allowed to have roosters around but have found that some hens get broody, anyway, refusing to leave the unfertilized eggs that they've hatched.
• Some broody birds may even sit on other hens' eggs.
• Broody hens can be deliberately encouraged to adopt chicks from another hen's brood, by placing newborn chicks beneath the hen without her knowledge, and then monitoring her to be sure she doesn't see them too soon and peck at them, perceiving them to be intruders.
• Hens are very protective of their chicks, sheltering them under wing when rain is threatening and when it's cold outside, even after the chicks are well past newborn.
• Hens try to defend their chicks when other hens peck at them.

A writer at Wide Open Pets, a dot-com, assures us: "Mama hens are fiercely protective of their babies." That website quotes 16th-century writer Ulisse Aldrovandi, whose work is translated in a modern writing called The Chicken Book.

Aldrovandi wrote: "They follow their chicks with such great love that, if they see or spy at a distance any harmful animal, such as a kite or a weasel or someone even larger stalking their little ones, the hens first gather them under the shadow of their wings, and with this covering they put up such a very fierce defense — striking fear into their opponent in the midst of a frightful clamor, using both wings and beak — they would rather die for their chicks than seek safety in flight."

Maybe the attention ancient people gave to brooding hens is what prompted Yesu Himself to compare Himself to an expectant momma.

"How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing," said the Holy Spirit in Jesus. (Matthew 23:37)

But there also is more than one momma-hen prophesy, easily misunderstood, from the psalms or songs of David. David trusted what the prophets said about Jesus, the coming Messiah, God with us. David's psalms speak of our heavenly Savior as if His motherly sacrifice of Himself would be a refuge for generations to come.

"He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart." (Psalm 91:4)

"Have mercy on me, my God, have mercy on me, for in you I take refuge. I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed." (Psalm 57:1)

It's a wonder, that our Savior's cross became His "wings," a shadow in which each of us,

as Christians, takes refuge.