How to introduce baby chick to hen with 2 week old chick

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ummiuwais

ummiuwais

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Hi, this is our first post - we have been reading BYC for a few months.

Our South African Potch koekoek was sitting on a few eggs, however, she had been 'stealing' eggs from another hen everyday, so the age of each egg is different. The 1st one hatched, and unfortunately, we had to move her to a different run soon after. She stopped sitting on the eggs, so we started incubating the other eggs in a home-made bator. One of them has started pipping now, and now we are wondering if it is possible to introduce this new baby to the mother hen, who already has a two week old chick with her.

Looking forward to the replies, thanks a lot.
 
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Welcome to BYC!

Congrats on the one baby that momma hatched! I don't have any experience with adding chicks as you are doing in your situation. There will be others stop by here to welcome you, that have possibly tried this and will have more info for you. You may need to brood these yourself, I am not sure.

Good luck with the hatch and welcome to our flock!
 
Welcome to BYC! Unfortunately in my experience introducing chicks to older chicks/mama hasn't worked for me. She may not accept them as her own.. you can try putting them under her at night to see if she will accept them but make sure you monitor them closely. Good luck to you!
 
liz9910 said:
Welcome to BYC! Unfortunately in my experience introducing chicks to older chicks/mama hasn't worked for me. She may not accept them as her own.. you can try putting them under her at night to see if she will accept them but make sure you monitor them closely. Good luck to you!
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Thanks. Monitoring might be quite difficult - we would have to sit there the whole night, or close to dawn, to see what the mother hen does with the new baby chick.
I think we might have to raise the new ones our selves. Quite sad though, they will miss out on the mommys experience and care.
 
Hello :frow and Welcome To BYC! X2, with that much of an age difference it is going to be really difficult. Some really good broodys would let you do it, but if you don't know how she will react you'd need to be really careful. If you can set up a brooder that would work, you might try the usual way of introducing chickens and keep them on opposite sides of a wire for awhile and see if the hen responds to the chick at all.
 

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