Should I get all males?

[marquisella]

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I have to disagree. I have 6 mo old bbw toms and I tried to introduce another young male, and they attacked him.There are no hens in their pen. They can move, I was running around the pen trying to separate their hold on the new one....

 

[ShadyHoller]

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Absolutely, I follow you when you say sexual maturity and year of age are different concepts. No disagreement from me there.

I was speaking in terms of one year of age because I was responding to this post:

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In that context, I said our birds fought at younger than a year of age. Again, let me be the first to concede that I'm talking heritage birds, and the OP was talking BB, so I'm not saying my experience applies.

 

[seymojo536]

I can answer for fighting among BBWs. Yes they will fight. Right around 15-16 weeks is when they start fighting for keeps. Sexing is not 100% accurate. We have received a hen or two in our batches of birds. The hens do not grow out as fast as the toms. At 16 weeks a tom will dress out right at 20 lbs. a hen will be lucky to hit 16. The toms will always pick on the smallest/weakest one and that is usually a hen. Once it is gone, they start in on the next one in the pecking order. You can't stop it, but you can do some things to minimize the damage.

The way we handle our birds is we have several small pens set up to segregate any "problem" birds. Hens are removed as soon as we can ID them. If the fighting gets too bad, we will remove the picked on bird. One thing we never do is; once a bird has been separated it cannot be returned to the flock or have another bird placed with it.

Always keep the feeders filled (goes without saying). Don't give them a reason to compete.

If you have the space, set up a couple of escape/safe spots for the low pecking birds. We use 2'x4' pieces of plywood to make a couple of a-frame structures. It gives them a place to hid out.

Any birds with pecked heads or tails are treated with blood stop and then with pine tar. Main thing is to keep an eye on them and try to head off the serious issues. If they seem to be able to defend themselves, we just let them sort it out on their own.

 

[Frosty]

Might be because mine spend a lot of time free ranging if the predator load isn't too bad. I know that they get around very well when they are 6 months old, but a one year old doesn't. I have never introduced new birds to the flock while they are young so I can't tell you how they do with an introduction, I would imagine about the same as a heritage would react.

If mine are free ranging, I only feed them about once a week to remind them that they live here, the rest they forage for themselves (though I do keep an eye on their condition to make sure they aren't starving). Maybe that is the difference? Mine are putting their energy into finding food instead of picking on each other. But for some reason, even when they are penned up mine don't fight and I don't keep feed in front of them 24/7 because I don't want them to gain weight as fast as possible. I feel it's easier on their legs if the weight gain is slower and I don't want a monster sized bird in Nov. Biggest we ever had was a 27 pound tom at about 6 months old (and at 5 months they were still flying up to perch on a 6' fence). I have hens and toms running together and never had problems, but then again I have only been raising BB turkeys since 1995 so maybe I have just been lucky. Great grasshopper control though!

I just had to combine my flocks due to the roof on one building collapsing. There were three toms and five hens (including a two year old BBB, the rest heritage) in the building that came down. One heritage hen escaped and I haven't seen her since, the BBB hen got a broken leg and had to be put down. The other six were transferred to the building with four BBW hens and two geese, things are still peaceful out there. That will probably change when breeding season hits so as soon as I can find the ground under the snow I need to get to work on temporary pens while putting up another building.

 

[Frosty]

On the subject of introducing new birds, the fighting that I was talking about were amongst birds that were raised together, not when introducing new birds to the flock. When introducing new birds, I don't put new arrivals directly into the established flocks territory. Using my chickens as an example, say I want to introduce 5 new chickens to a flock of 30. If I throw them right in, it's pretty much a death sentance. So I put the 5 new chickens into another pen and add 5 from the established flock (usually at night). They get the pecking order established, and about a week later I add 10 from my flock to the new flock and let them work things out. So now I have 20 in the pen with the new birds, and 15 left in the original area. Once the new flock are all ok with each other, I move them back to the original pen where it's two similar sized flocks establishing the pecking order instead of the 5 new birds against 30 birds.

 

[pampered_poultry]

In my experience males all together will tend to fight or pick on another male if one shows weakness.