Two of the older girls will" tolerate" the new ones but there is one that seems to be pretty hostile. Intorducing them at night while roosting, introducing them in a free range situation, intorducing them in the day time supervised. The 3 older girls are not adapting well to the 3 new girls. They are about the same age, maybe a bit younger. The 3 new birds are a silkie, a polish and a buff orphington. I have 3 Rhode Island Reds about 4 months old that are just starting to lay. I am currently trying to add 3 new hens to my original 3 hens. There is simply no guarantee it will work. If I see more than a couple small drops of blood, they are back out again. The key is to watch VERY carefully for several days after you add them. Little bit of fighting the first day and now everyone is happy and getting along famously. The day after I did that, I added an established trio of a bantam barred rock and his 2 hens. I had gotten rid of the Sultan roo as he was getting horribly aggressive. That said, I had a small flock consisting of 2 Sultan hens and 3 bantam cochins. They get into horrible fights the second I put them together and they mean business. I have tried putting them together at night, I tried putting wire between the two and letting them live side by side for weeks on end, I tried putting the OTHER hen with the roo and re-introducing the original hen, etc. It does not store any personal data.I don't think there is any surefire way to put chickens together. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". It does not correspond to any user ID in the web application and does not store any personally identifiable information. The cookie is used by cdn services like CloudFare to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. Once a new pecking order has been established by either beating or chasing off the challengers, the barnyard returns to a semi-calm state.Īnd hopefully once our “hospitalized” turkeys heal they will be able to rejoin their flock with no incidents. Sometimes removing the picked on animal, letting it heal and then reintroducing it, changes the pecking order enough to allow the animal to reintegrate successfully. Allowing two flocks to get to know each other through a fence lessens the battles and is our preferred method of adding chickens to our flock. Even if there are only four or five birds to a cage it still isn’t a very good place to be.Ĭombining two groups of chickens can start an all-out war until one side establishes dominance. Crowded chickens will peck at each other when kept in cages with no escape. Our breeder sows are also kept in separate pens to avoid huge battles and possible injuries. And the battles didn’t stop until we removed the hens, making it a bachelor pen.Įveryone needs their own space and it’s not different for animals. Some of the smaller roosters were killed by the dominant ones. This is what these two turkeys were doing.īird hierarchy is called pecking order for obvious reasons.Ī pen full of mostly roosters and a few hens turned into a constant battle zone a few years ago. They also start fighting each other for dominance. Today while treating the injured turkeys with zinc ointment and moving the most injured ones into the “hospital” we noticed two uninjured turkeys facing off.Īt a few months old male turkeys start to puff up their feathers and strut around the pen, trying to impress the females. So this can’t be why some turkeys are getting picked on. But for the past couple of nights I’ve moved very sleepy hens back into their proper pen. There are two laying hens in the turkey house to overnight, so I thought it was possible they started the picking and the turkeys continued it. Often if turkeys don’t have enough feed or enough protein in their feed they will pick each other. Recently we noticed some of the turkeys had bloody wings and were being picked on by the others.
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