Greetings from AL!

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DobieLover said:
Hello and welcome to BYC! :frow Glad you joined.
You wrote that you got the birds with the house and they were in 3 flocks. Generally, a flock of birds will roost together. Did the previous owner have just one coop or three? How were they three flocks?
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:welcome :frow I was wondering the same thing. I have had a couple that were bullies over the years. If you have more than one coop you could put the bully in another coop for awhile and then put her back with the other birds and then see if she goes down in the pecking order. Usually when you isolate the bully for a week or so and when she is reintroduced to the flock she gets knocked down a peg or two. I had one where it didn't work so when I took some males to an auction, I took her too. Good luck and have fun...
 
DobieLover said:
Hello and welcome to BYC! :frow Glad you joined.
You wrote that you got the birds with the house and they were in 3 flocks. Generally, a flock of birds will roost together. Did the previous owner have just one coop or three? How were they three flocks?
Click to expand...

Thanks!
I was being a little on the hyperbolic side, but the birds had a minimally predator proofed run. They had a pretty barren yard and had a 9x16ft wire roofed run mostly made of 1x2 inch fencing, chicken wire, and hardware cloth at the bottom and as the roof(the neighbors told me the flock had been wiped out before, and I believe it. A 9x9 section of that pen has a tin roof, which is where they had a roosting ladder on one side of it, and on the other was an elevated nesting area with a ramp that they'd use to hop on top of the roof of the nesting space. So when we moved in 5-ish months ago the Orpington and the Sussex would sleep on the top of the nesting area, the RIRs would sleep on the platform, and the 4 easter eggers all slept on the roosting ladder. During the day everyone seemed to keep pretty strictly to their own group, but it seemed like the Sussex was the top hen.

After we added some scratch to their layer diet and treat toys like cabbage to keep them occupied one of the EEs started trying to social climb I think, snatching treats, and sleeping up top with the Orpington and the Sussex, and some of her EE friends followed. Which is about when the juvenile raccoons showed up! One of the EEs lost some feathers, and the Orpington got a mild injury and couldn't make that hop up top anymore, so the Easter kids all moved to the top, and she slept on the ladder where the Sussex joined her.

Spent a week tacking extra fencing on this termite infested rotting death trap and scattering cayenne powder to keep the raccoons at bay and broke down and bought an Eglu Cube because it was genuinely cheaper than trying to repair the run or build a shed. I realize it's small for the types of birds I've got right now, which is why I had plans to rehome some of them, but the social climber got very sick and I halted those plans until she saw the vet* last week and we could figure out what was going on.

So right now the Orpington is spending night one of isolation in a nesting box in the death pen, the Sussex is in week 2 or 3 of broody, and everyone else is chilling pretty peacefully in the Cube.

*We took the social climber and the Sussex out of the 8 because I was worried about something viral, turns out everyone has leg mites, and the weird eggs with no shell and other eggs with weird concrete-textured patches got the EE group diagnosed with "probably old." So since they're having weird reproductive issues and the personalities of bottle rockets the EEs are pretty high on the cull list. I'd like to have the Sussex hatch out some heritage chicks that could be long-term layers, since I'd rather have a 5 year hen that lays modestly then a high volume breed. But the Orpington has been going for eyes lately and I'm not sure I trust her not to kill a chick right now.

Honestly I'm not sure where to go from here. I'm not afraid to cull her if I have to, but I don't want to have to do it because I made the mistake of playing favorites with her in an environment where her flock mates have to suffer for it.

cmom said:
:welcome :frow I was wondering the same thing. I have had a couple that were bullies over the years. If you have more than one coop you could put the bully in another coop for awhile and then put her back with the other birds and then see if she goes down in the pecking order. Usually when you isolate the bully for a week or so and when she is reintroduced to the flock she gets knocked down a peg or two. I had one where it didn't work so when I took some males to an auction, I took her too. Good luck and have fun...
Click to expand...

Tonight is her first night alone back in the old coop. It's in the same yard as the newer one so I'm hoping that it'll still work when she can see them, because the alternative is a chicken in the house and my family has limits. 🐔
 

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