They quickly denuded it, but it takes time for parasites to build up. What happened was probably this: Their first batch of chicks was given access to a pristine yard. In fact, it’s so bad that I noticed the following pattern when surveying the poultry literature of the past 100 years: People with yarded operations would have a wonderful first year, an okay second year, and would suddenly vanish without a trace the third year. A muddy, over-manured yard is parasite paradise. Unfortunately, lots of people have small, barren yards for chickens. Older chickens usually have a tolerance to these things unless your environment is particularly unhygienic. Roost mites, coccidiosis, and various kinds of worms are hard to avoid. These days, most flocks are disease-free, but not parasite-free. This technique can be used when housing two groups of chickens in the same coop, by partitioning the coop with chicken wire temporarily. It also lets the newcomers get used to their new environment without having to deal with the older chickens. The chickens can see each other and interact somewhat, which helps. Keeping the newcomers fenced off from the oldsters for a few days helps. Just make sure that the older chickens have equally good feed as the new ones, so there’s no incentive to raid the newcomers’ coop. Keep the new chickens cooped up in their new house for a couple of days so they know where home is, then let them loose to mingle in the yard with the others. They can share a yard with the other chickens. (I have more than a dozen!) Life is much simpler if you can house the new chickens in their own coop. If you think you can get away with having just one chicken coop, you’re fooling yourself. It’s one reason why I have little difficulty introducing a batch of new pullets into the mix. This only works when the new chickens all know each other, though. The new chickens will band together and head to the feeders and waterers as a body, and the old chickens will back off in the face of the mob. The bigger the group of newcomers, the less trouble they will have, because of flocking behavior. There are some time-honored ways to prevent this:Īdd large numbers of new chickens at a time. Surrounded by strangers, every one of which wants to shove you to the bottom of the pecking order, is hard on the new chickens, who will retreat into a hiding place and refuse to come out, often starving to death. Bullyingīeing bullied to the point of death happens mostly when you add a few chickens to a large existing flock. Electric garden fence (electronetting about 18″ high) does a pretty good job, and doesn’t exclude the farmer, who can step over the fence without bothering to turn it off. Keeping the older chickens away for at least a day or two also helps prevent piling. It’s a long time before there are enough chickens in any one place to get a good pile going.įencing. They’ll gradually start jumping out, but it takes a long time before the timid ones emerge, and in the meantime, the crates are sized to make piling impossible. Another gimmick that works pretty well is to move them into the chicken coop in poultry shipping crates, set the crates inside the coop, open the lid, but don’t remove the chickens. Chicks also panic more easily in the dark, so when I put them out in their pasture houses, I hang a flashlight from a rafter and leave it on all night (hooray for rechargeable batteries!). Later I move them a couple of feet up in the air. I set long 2×2’s on the floor of the brooder house to start with, when the chicks are just a few days old, so the chicks can roost before they can fly. Chicks learn to roost by roosting, so the way to speed up the process is to give them something to roost on. So the earlier the chicks learn to roost, the shorter the danger period. As it happens, when the chicks learn to roost, the roosting instinct replaces the piling instinct. Birds have very weak lungs, so the ones on the bottom smother. The problem is, if there’s not mother hen, the chicks hide in a dark place, typically the corner of the chicken house, and heap themselves in a big pile. This is instinctual, so even incubator chicks do it. Piling and Smotheringīaby chicks respond to stress by diving underneath the mother hen’s feathers.
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