HELP! Rejected chick :-(

[chickengeorgeto]

Odd. This was the only dark colored chick...maybe that was it? Which is funny, because Fanny is black as pitch!

Chickens don't share our human sense of race or color as you've obviously found out. A hen perceives a difference in her chicks and then she acts on her perception. This is how hens have protected their DNA from nest parasites since time out of mind. The problem was not that she had a black chick but that she had ONE chick that didn't match the others. Refer back to "Chicken Math."

 

[DarcyRN]

Now I REALLY need help! I left my house for a few hours today (for the first time since the hatch) and came home to a dead chick! I am almost certain my Australorp hen Famny did it. It was one of the chicks from my other hen's brood. What can I do?! I do not have facilities to separate them. Up to now, Flo (the one who lost a chick today) has been staying inside the henhouse with her chicks while Fanny (the likely perpetrator) is roaming the yard with hers. Just awful. Advice please!

 

[chickengeorgeto]

Thankfully or maybe not, chickens don't share our human sense of loss, but any time you separate a chick from its brood and then reintroduce it or add a different peep you run the risk of rejection.

It usually works best if you add a smaller peep into a clutch of older or larger peeps. There is less chance of the hen rejecting the younger smaller chick as she views it as less of a threat to her own brood. This is also why I don't like natural hatches that drag on for days and days.

By the same token a hen with two dozen chicks is no prouder of her clutch than the hen with only one chick, and the hen with 24 peeps will still be just as happy with only one chick as she originally was with the whole 2 dozen. In other words being a chicken is emotionally easy.