Merging our Chicken Flock.....

If you have been following our story here on Steemit you will remember our chicks that we got a few months back. We started them in the brooder and as they grew the moved to our quarantine area which was converted from a horse stall by adding chicken wire ceiling, walls, and part of the floor. We started with 30 chicks and lost two along the way, but now at 16 weeks old they have out grown the stall and need to grow outside!

Now merging essentially two full flocks of chickens can be tough. We have 23 laying hens & a rooster in our laying flock and we will be adding 28, 16 week old birds. Now chickens can be very smart, they also can be very stupid. When merging flocks, I think the stupid comes out in full force! To be nice its real not stupidity it’s a change in structure, not only the physical structure but the times of day that things happen.

When chickens are raised like ours on pasture they wake and sleep with the sun, this is something strange for the chicks because they have only gotten indirect sunlight. We turn on and off the lights in the barn to simulate the outside conditions, but that is on our schedule not nature's. Our laying flock is the first to get fed in the morning, even before we eat!

We started two weeks ago getting them used to the wet grains we supplement the laying hens with. A dish of wet food every day, then we slowly reduced the grower mix till it was less than 50% of the daily food intake. We will do a chicken operation post in the near future to give you a glimpse into how we do things with chickens.

So, Saturday night was the big night, we banded the legs of each bird with a small orange zip tie, I guess they got bling now! We then loaded the birds into a carrier (old dog crate) and moved to the coop. We waited until it was dark, carted them out to the coop and in they went, rather unwillingly….

It took about an hour, catching chickens has become more of an art than chance, if ya can get them cornered you have a pretty good chance of success! (Late in the process, we used a pallet to funnel them into a corner and finished a lot sooner than we would have). Early Sunday morning both Colleen and I got up right as the sun was coming up and let the girls out, the existing hens flew out of there like they always do, but the new girls just stood there and looked at us…. So we had to open the big gate and get in ourselves and encourage them to go out and get something to eat!

Speaking of eating we made sure to put out twice as much wet grain as we would normally put out for that many birds and then spread scratch gains later in the day, we just wanted to make sure they got something to eat, we cut the ration today and will keep cutting it back to the normal amount over the period of a week.

Re-establishing the pecking order was first on the list for the older hens and the rooster, there was a lot of pecking and chasing and nastiness to go around. The trick is to make sure the new hens had a place to hide and lots of room to get away. It was nice to see some of the new girls fight back trying to establish themselves. By Wednesday, the pecking order will have been re-established and all will be right in the world, and hopefully we will not lose any birds in the process.We will keep you updated in future posts, let us know the methods you use for merging flocks, we would love to know!