Co-parenting Quandary

[balak]

Two broody silkies have hatched out six babies (three brown, three grey). Our white hen (Snowflake) has decided she does not prefer the grey chicks and is being quite aggressive with them, despite them being hers. The brown chicks hatched a day earlier and are more active. The other hen (Cinnamon) appears accepting of all the babies.

Time to separate Snowflake from the chicks and just give Cinnamon all the babies? Or should we give Snowflake her preferred babies even though they belong to Cinnamon? This is our first time using broody hens to hatch so all advice and recommendations welcome!

 

[NatJ]

Time to separate Snowflake from the chicks and just give Cinnamon all the babies? Or should we give Snowflake her preferred babies even though they belong to Cinnamon? This is our first time using broody hens to hatch so all advice and recommendations welcome!

Either way could work fine.

It might be easier to manage one broody hen with all the chicks, and put the other hen back with the flock.

Or you might want to give each hen the experience of raising chicks, in which case yes you would give Snowflake the chicks she wants and let Cinnamon raise the rest since she likes them all.

I think you could choose either option and things would work fine. But either way, it is time to split them up so that Snowflake is not in the same pen with the babies she dislikes.

 

[Ridgerunner]

My personal preference is to let one hen raise all the chicks. With my set-up it is so much simpler. I've had hens fight over chicks, wanting to raise all of them herself. I've never seen this myself but some people say they have had a hen kill the chicks under a different hen. Some people can have different broody hens with their own chicks together without issues but sometimes you can have problems. Just to reduce the possibilities of problems I'd want to separate the two hens and chicks. Separating the two broody hens and chicks until they are weaned just would not work with my set-up.

If you raise all the chicks under one hen the chicks will form their own little sub-flock when the hen weans them and hang together until they mature enough to join the main flock. If you raise them separately they will need to integrate after the hens wean them. This could be easy or could cause problems.

If you take the chicks away from one hen she should break from being broody in two or three days and go back to a member of the flock. She probably will not start laying for several weeks, it takes a while for her to internal plumbing to reset itself so she can start laying.

I don't worry about upsetting my hormonal broody hens as they will get over it pretty quickly. My preference is to make my life easier when it does not hurt the chickens. Others have different priorities.

 

[balak]

Thank you so much for the replies! We have removed Snowflake and put her back out with the rest of the flock. The chicks seem much calmer already with just Cinnamon in the brooder.