uh oh, Added more chickens to flock, PLEASE READ

[happyhens44]

I have 10 chickens about 8 months old, Today I got 4 more hens..

why do they keep fighting?

will they always fight, or will they get use to each other?

how long to you think it will take?

whats the best thing to do in this problem?


please answer soon I have a few combs bleeding, but not too bad.

thanks

 

[NonnasBabies]

They have to establish a pecking order but it's better to try to slowly intergrate them than to just throw them together. Do they have a way to get away from the others??

 

[Kittymomma]

Well it sounds like it's too late now, but the best thing to do is quarintine for a month before exposing your flock to new birds. Lots of horror stories on here of people having to cull or close their flocks after bringing disease in when they skipped quarintine. Hopefully you'll get lucky this time, but please remember that for the future.

When integrating it usually goes best if you can pen the new birds next to your main flock for a week or two before letting them be together--look, but don't touch. I like to let mine free range together for another week after that, but go back to their seperate coops at night. If all that goes pretty well I add an extra feed/water station to the main coop/run (so bullies can't easily keep newbies from eating/drinking) as well as a few distractions such as hanging a cabbage and a suet feeder or flockblock. I put the new birds into the main coop at night (after observing their daytime interactions) and lock everybody down for two weeks so the new ones don't just turn around and try to go back to the temp. coop that they've been using.

 

[gkeesling]

I've just thrown my new ones in with the old ones. There is one whale of a ruckus at first, but in a day or two, they are all one big happy family. I have found out that it's best if you only have one or two it's not a good idea to just throw them into the "lion's den", but if I had 4 or 5 then it worked out just fine and they integrated pretty quickly.

 

[Tigerjane]

If you have a large dog crate (or two), that'll work, as will plastic poultry netting, which you can get for very cheap and section off a piece of the coop/run with it. We made a pen out of that and some 2x4's, and used it to integrate our two batches for a week, and we had no issues at all.