Hens want the same nest box - NEST WARS ! Warning: graphic footage of nest box behaviour

Why do hens all lay in the same nest box? If a hen comes into the nest box area to lay and sees an egg in one box, she wants to lay her egg there too. Why? Well, because if someone else laid their egg in that box, it must be the best one, of course!
Actually, although it might seem that the chickens are just following fashion and not making their own assessment and decisions, this is really part of chickens’ instinctive behaviour that makes good sense. Unlike some animals and even other species of birds, chickens lay their eggs in a communal nest, with the expectation that whichever hen broods the eggs and raises the chicks will do so regardless of whether or not she is their natural, genetic mother. It’s possible that having all the hens in a flock laying in one nest makes it quicker to accumulate enough eggs to make a clutch, which one hen will then start brooding. Leaving all the others free to start a new collection for the next clutch without being burdened by the job of raising the first clutch of chicks. And in nature the chickens in a flock will probably be quite closely related to each other, so the chicks that one hen is raising are probably her own offspring or those of her sisters or cousins.
So a hen who sees one or more eggs already in the box, is convinced that she should also lay right there, adding her egg to the precious collection.
If the nest is already occupied, then if she’s a lower rank than the hen laying, she will either wait her turn for the favoured nest box, anxiously returning and looking to see if the box is free yet, or she might decide she just can’t wait and settle for a similar box.
But if she’s a similar or higher rank in the pecking order as the hen currently laying in the box, she will just squeeze right in and proceed with her egg laying regardless of the poor hen who was there first.
There is an occasional nonconformist who will sneak off and find her own secret nest spot that no one else knows about and accumulate her own little collection of eggs. What I think is going on here is there are two different impulses in effect at the same time. One is to hide the eggs safe from egg-thieving predators. All chickens want to find such a secure nest, but in some hens this is the strongest instinct above all others.
The other instinct is to lay where the others lay, to accumulate a communal egg collection as quickly as possible and to minimise the work of raising the chicks by having one hen do the mothering duties for a whole clutch of chicks. For most hens this communal instinct is very strong, so if they see an egg already in a nest box, they are convinced that it must be the absolute best place to lay their egg there too.

Included is some amazing footage. The brown hen, her name is Shirley, has squeezed into the nest box where the white hen, Remy, was already resting after laying her white egg. Remy isn’t ready to leave yet so she just sits tight, but Shirley ignores her and goes ahead and lays her egg anyway. Shirley isn’t a hen who hangs around on the nest long once that egg laying job is done – she’s off to get a drink of water and find something to snack on, and Remy makes claim on Shirley’s brown egg too.

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