- Jun 22, 2016
- 9
- 59
- 94
The last time I integrated pullets into my flock was a tough one. I have 2 barred rocks that are top of the pecking order, I’ll call them the career criminals. One of my new easter eggers ended upon the bottom of the list and even after successfully integrating all of them, they bullied her to the point she dropped dead one night, about a year later. Any number of reasons could explain it, I suppose, but the most likely is that she was so stressed out that she just gave out.
I picked up 6 new chicks a while back and had them in a temporary shelter in my workshop up until a week ago. The weather is balmy, they have feathers, it’s time to let them stretch out a bit and do chicken stuff. However, they are too young to put into my flock and I really don’t want to re-live that experience, so a new strategy is needed.
The coop and run I have is one that I built, and it’s pretty modular. I needed more space for the expanded flock, so I built another coop and run of the same design and mated them together. The coop w/nesting boxes has entry points on each side, one side being the original structure and the other being the new half. That door is closed, for the time being. The other key piece in this puzzle is that I left the wire cloth separating the runs in place. This gives me two runs that are joined together but separate. The birds can see each other, but cannot co-mingle. I built a temporary structure in the new run for the pullets to use, but at this point they seem more interested in hanging out on top of it than in it
When the pullets gain some size and mass I will take the most dominant and least dominant hens from the other side and put them with the pullets, at the same time taking the two most aggressive pullets and putting them with the remaining hens. At this point I wil play it by ear but if successful I think I can remove the wire in a week to separate the runs and mash together two flocks with recently established pecking orders.
I picked up 6 new chicks a while back and had them in a temporary shelter in my workshop up until a week ago. The weather is balmy, they have feathers, it’s time to let them stretch out a bit and do chicken stuff. However, they are too young to put into my flock and I really don’t want to re-live that experience, so a new strategy is needed.
The coop and run I have is one that I built, and it’s pretty modular. I needed more space for the expanded flock, so I built another coop and run of the same design and mated them together. The coop w/nesting boxes has entry points on each side, one side being the original structure and the other being the new half. That door is closed, for the time being. The other key piece in this puzzle is that I left the wire cloth separating the runs in place. This gives me two runs that are joined together but separate. The birds can see each other, but cannot co-mingle. I built a temporary structure in the new run for the pullets to use, but at this point they seem more interested in hanging out on top of it than in it
When the pullets gain some size and mass I will take the most dominant and least dominant hens from the other side and put them with the pullets, at the same time taking the two most aggressive pullets and putting them with the remaining hens. At this point I wil play it by ear but if successful I think I can remove the wire in a week to separate the runs and mash together two flocks with recently established pecking orders.
