elcarchick
In the Brooder
I am pretty new to chickens, I've had this flock for around 8-9 months. My older hens (3 White Leghorns and 2 RIR's) and my Polish rooster are a little over a year old, my remaining hens (Barred Rock, 2 Black Sex Links, New Hampshire Red, Easter Egger and Buff Orpington) are about 10 months old. My rooster is quite young and vigorous and has been paying a lot of attention to his 11 hens. They all have quite a lot of wear on their backs. However, I've been noticing that my Barred Rock has been trying to avoid the rooster. She is in the middle of the pecking order, my Leghorns and RIR's are on top. She is laying eggs and is quite normal otherwise, and she definitely looks prettier due to the absence of bold patches on her back. I think she's been avoiding the rooster to the point that her eggs are not all fertile. The reason I think that is because my Buff has just hatched 8 out of 9 eggs and the 9th didn't have any signs of life in it and looked like it could be my Barred Rock's egg. Well, this whole situation has not been bothering me much until today when I saw that the entire flock was chasing her. Particularly, my dominant leghorns were chasing and pecking her, but others were joining in too. My rooster was running and squawking like crazy after her, cornered her and treaded her, yet a couple of minutes later was chasing her again and pecking on her even after she squatted for him. They all were so mean to her that she stuck her head through the fence wire to avoid being pecked. Can anyone explain this kind of behavior? They have a pretty good size pasture to roam around, so there is plenty of space to run and hide and I do not expect anyone to get hurt, but I'd like to be able to understand what is going on in my chicken flock to cause that kind of behavior.
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