Reintegration after comb injury

[sakerobot]

She took a break from laying eggs after Monday, until today (Saturday) when she gave us a healthy shelled egg.

We attempted supervised reintegration, after adding Vaseline to her comb: at first there were no issues, but after about 20 minutes one of the hens was tugging on her comb. I took and isolated the offending hen, kept watching the rest. Eventually they picked at her too, the purple dye hasn't fully worn off and might have been made more prominent from Vaseline causing it to be shiny. Will try again when she is less shiny.

Overall it didn't go too bad, they spent about an hour together.

Not sure how I feel about using Bluekote again unless I have purple chickens.

 

[sakerobot]

Another healthy egg today that she laid at 2 pm outside into a cardboard nesting box. Weather was miserable, so no full reintroduction attempts, possibly for a few more days. She will keep being exposed to the others through the fence.

 

[Eggcessive]

Sorry that they are still picking on her. Maybe try the wire dog crate with food and water, and allow the crate to be with the others at all times. Pinless peepers can help if it is just one or two hens picking on her. I hope it gets easier.

 

[sakerobot]

We had a better result when we tried two days ago - once again there was one bully we had to isolate (she seemed to be bullying others too), but after separating the bully the rest got along just fine and we didn't observe any unusual pecking for over an hour of watching. One difference may be that the last time just before letting her out, we added Vaseline and that anti-pecking stuff which made her head extra shiny.

Yesterday was miserable rain all day, but we will try again soon. We'll probably isolate the bully for a couple days to lower her self-esteem.

Here's a picture of the reintegration, the injured hen is the one most to the right.

A mugshot of the bully:

 

[Eggcessive]

Some people use pinless peepers on the bully, so she cannot focus on an object to peck. I haven’t used them, but many say they work. Here are places that sell them, as well as Amazon if you look around, and some use a separate plier to apply them:
https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/pinless_peepers.htmlhttps://www.eggcartons.com/blogs/news/pinless-peepers

 

[sakerobot]

We decided to order some pinless peepers for emergency. With it being winter, the nostrils being covered and getting clogged is concerning.

For now we've simply isolated the bully, we basically traded her for the injured chicken. The bully laid one egg in the basement successfully.

The injured chicken had no issues with any of the other chickens all day, so we let them roost together in the coop. This went well, though she tried to roost in one of the nesting boxes but I moved her at closing.

Today the flock (minus the bully) are doing just fine together, and she looks healthy.

We will attempt to reintroduce the bully after a couple days

 

[sakerobot]

The injured hen has been successfully staying with the flock for three days and nights. She is looking healthy and active, no one is bothering her, it's hard to tell her apart from the others.

The bully is still in isolation, but had exposure to the flock through a fence today. We'll attempt her reunion next time we have enough time to monitor them for a while.

Offending chicken:

 

[sakerobot]

Just to follow up on this:

- the originally injured chicken (hereafter: "Princess Chicken") has been living with the rest of the flock, minus the one bully, and has had no more problems and no one picks on her.
- the bully was given a couple weeks of timeout, where she slept in the basement at night, and during the day was placed in an 8x8 closed run from which she could see but not access the rest of the flock. On days with really bad weather she had to be kept inside all day.
- the bully's last reintegration went better than the first, she has fallen a few ranks on the pecking order and only two are below her, though one of those is Princess Chicken. The other one is a late bloomer who challenged the bully, lost, and then showed signs of submission, causing the bully to leave her alone. PC doesn't challenge the bully and tries to avoid her, while several others seem to be keeping the bully "in place", and causing her to submit. I didn't see any violence aside from some initial pecking.