Chicks pecking each other's eyes. How can I prevent it?

I like the red dot idea and the sod.
I had an incubator issue and a cockerel hatched with a blood spot on its eye. His sister that hatched with him never left it alone and it got much worse. I had to separate them a week till it healed.

I like to take a sharpie and make dots and squiggles all over the cardboard liner of my brooder. I place a few of them up high so they have to jump to get them. They spend a lot of time chasing those little marks! How bout putting in a mirror?

Beekissed said:

I've never seen chicks injure each other with eye pecking either but I do things a little differently than most folks, I'm thinking. For one, they get a clump of sod to peck at, consume, climb on, from the area where they will be eventually living. They also have deep litter that has been used by my older flock which has a lot of various things to peck at in it already...different textures, materials and shapes. I also use nipple buckets instead of regular chick waterers, so they have something red to peck at.

One lady suggested painting a red dot with finger nail polish at regular intervals around the brooder box to keep chicks occupied, so that may help in your situation. Placing some sod in there may help as well and will be a two fold benefit of exposing them early on to the soil culture they will be living on so they can form immunities when they are supposed to..in the first few weeks of life.

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I really like the SOD idea and will be adding that into my brooder!

song of joy said:

I had a RIR chick that did this. She went around to all the other chicks in the brooder and would peck at their eyes. It stopped after a day or two, and everyone was OK....

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kyexotics said:

In 6yrs and well over 1000 birds, we've never had an eye injury due to a peck,. we believe it's a very rare event if it happens...Let em peck, it's usually, in our experience, to get food off each others face...

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Beekissed said:

I've never seen chicks injure each other with eye pecking either...

One lady suggested painting a red dot with finger nail polish at regular intervals around the brooder box to keep chicks occupied...

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Human babies have chunky little hands to grasp objects, all the better to help the child stick said objects into the infants' mouth to see what taste good and what doesn't.

Because baby chicks don't have fingers and hands they can only explore their world with their beaks or bills.

Before you feed your next batch of just hatched chicks, line your brooder floor with old news print. Don't worry about the ink, theses days its made from soybeans. Also spread a teaspoonful of chick sized granite grit on the news print. You will quickly see that chicks explore their environment by pecking at the odd things that they find in their surroundings. The grit is also a good first addition to your biddies digestive system.

Besides pecking at and exploring the granite grit your chicks will try to pickup and eat the printing off the newspaper. This is why it is not a good idea to allow a small child to play too personally with a chicken. The bird may become curious about those two shiny things that keep appearing and disappearing from behind the child's eyelids and using a chicken's reasoning your birds may want to see how they taste.

If this was not so then there would be many 1,000s of jobs openings for chicken teachers to help the billions and billions of baby chicks hatched each year learn how to feed themselves.

lazy gardener said:

I like to take a sharpie and make dots and squiggles all over the cardboard liner of my brooder. I place a few of them up high so they have to jump to get them. They spend a lot of time chasing those little marks! How bout putting in a mirror?

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The cardboard box has little bits of recycled paper in it- so it already has dots! They peck it day and night. Anyway, they only pecked eyes the first few days, they've mostly stopped now.

Beekissed said:

I've never seen chicks injure each other with eye pecking either but I do things a little differently than most folks, I'm thinking. For one, they get a clump of sod to peck at, consume, climb on, from the area where they will be eventually living. They also have deep litter that has been used by my older flock which has a lot of various things to peck at in it already...different textures, materials and shapes. I also use nipple buckets instead of regular chick waterers, so they have something red to peck at.

One lady suggested painting a red dot with finger nail polish at regular intervals around the brooder box to keep chicks occupied, so that may help in your situation. Placing some sod in there may help as well and will be a two fold benefit of exposing them early on to the soil culture they will be living on so they can form immunities when they are supposed to..in the first few weeks of life.

Click to expand...

Oh yes, they love sod and dirt. I even let them out in the dirt when it's sunny. I put a small pot full of moss in there brooder... they ate the whole pot of dirt and moss in a week. I don't raise mine like most people probably do either. I think raising chickens is all about doing it naturally and without chemicals so they grow up and live like almost wild birds. Oh, and I also kiss them all (people kiss their other pets, right?)

Soot the silkie said:

Oh yes, they love sod and dirt. I even let them out in the dirt when it's sunny. I put a small pot full of moss in there brooder... they ate the whole pot of dirt and moss in a week. I don't raise mine like most people probably do either. I think raising chickens is all about doing it naturally and without chemicals so they grow up and live like almost wild birds. Oh, and I also kiss them all (people kiss their other pets, right?)

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You answered another of my questions! lol The coop I have built for them is mainly on a large moss section and was wondering if they enjoy moss or not!

RitzHomestead said:

You answered another of my questions! lol The coop I have built for them is mainly on a large moss section and was wondering if they enjoy moss or not!

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Oh yes those little things are moss eaters! My coop was also built on moss and grass too. I thought, "well I only have two chickens so they won't eat ALL that moss and grass." How wrong I was. In less than a month the moss and grass was gone. Now their enclosure is just muck.