The chicks are six weeks old now and are on the verge of being official chickens, not chicks.
It’s chilly, but warm enough for them to be outside without a heat lamp. Now the tricky part, we are moving them today into the hay barn where they will stay in their crate for two or three days.
By week’s end, they’ll be released to tend to themselves. We have to be careful since the two older hens will go after them if they can. Chickens are often hostile to newcomers.
We’ll let the chicks decide where to roost for a few days, it should be the barn, and then we’ll put them in the big roost with the two hens and close them up together.
They should all roost in the same place after that. This is their last day in the cow stall in the pole barn. They are ready to live in the world.
Hi Jon,
Please check with someone you know physically and trust, on the veracity of this chicken tip. I thought it was ingenious when I read it, so the idea never left my head.
The tip was in a memoir somewhere. It went, that the narrator’s father told him that it was a known issue that older resident chickens don’t like newcomer chickens coming into their territory. So the chicken farmers just made sure to introduce the new chickens when every older hen was asleep. They saw to it that the older chickens were roosting and asleep, and put the new sleepy chicken right next to them where they were roosting. When the older chickens awoke
the next morning they would look at the new hen and decide they must have known that chicken all along, if they were
sleeping together. So they all proceeded to get along just fine.
I’d be curious to read what you find out, if and when you check that factoid out. I thought it was hilarious.
Nancy
This is good advice and true, N, this is pretty much the way we do it. We wait until the older hens are in the roost and we just slip the news one in. Chickens are not the smartest creatures in the planet, they just forget that they weren’t there the night before. It’s a good method, we did it last tie, we’ll do it again, and yes I will share the results..I’m quite confident it will work, it has every other time for us..
I love chickens and their strange ways!! I used to volunteer in a sanctuary and would hum and whistle songs to the fowl, they are so vibrational they’d go crazy happy.
Chicks become chickens when they stop peeping and begin clucking. But be prepared for the pecking order to be established! BTW, They are very handsome chicks.