Chicken Integration

Hi, Massachusettschicken here. If you read my first post, you know that I have a flock with lots of different kinds and ages of chickens. Getting them all together into one big and hopefully happy family took a lot of work. One of the most frequently asked questions on chicken discussion boards is how to integrate new chickens into your flock. The answer depends on a number of factors: how many chickens are currently in the flock, how many chickens are you trying to bring in, how old are they, are they the pullets or cockerels, are they bantams or standards, etc. I will try to explain the principles and strategies that have worked for Massachusettschicken and Chicken Mama.

1: Remember these are chickens, not people. Those cute little fluff balls that come running up to you looking for treats will absolutely peck new members to death if you don't handle the situation correctly.

2: Numbers count. It is much easier to introduce new birds if they outnumber the old ones. Adding eight juveniles to a flock of four adults is far easier than adding one juvenile to a flock of 12.

3: Know your breeds/genders. Some breeds tend to be aggressive, others overly passive. To take an extreme example, if you try to introduce a Salmon Faverolle to a flock of Aseels, you are just asking for trouble. Also, some roosters will completely reject any new cockerels. While it's important to be aware of the temperament of the breeds of chickens you have and are trying to introduce, it's equally important to understand that there will always be exceptions. We have a Buff Orpington hen who became so aggressive when we introduced a bunch of juveniles that we called that. "Fluffy's reign of terror." Here's a picture of the vicious thing:

4: Looking for troublemakers? Turn the pecking order upside down. When you introduce new chickens, the birds at the top of the old pecking order tend to not be threatened and are therefore less troublesome. I don't know whether the birds at the bottom of the pecking order see the new members as threats to their already precarious positions or whether they think, "Finally, someone I can pick on!" Either way, watch the bottom rung birds very carefully.

5: Slow but steady wins the race. However you choose to introduce new members, take your time. We usually begin at about six weeks of age. Depending on the weather, you might have to wait until eight weeks.

We put a medium-sized cage inside the chicken pen, and we add a feeder, a waterer, and a roost or two. Make sure that the big chickens cannot get at the little ones through the bars of the cage. To be on the safe side, we covered the cage with deer netting.

From six weeks to 10 weeks, the little ones spent the day in the chicken tractor and the night in the cage. From 10 to 12 weeks, they spent all of their time in the cage, so they were near the older birds 24/7. At 12 weeks, we added a door that was big enough for the little ones to get through but too small for the big ones.


When I first opened the door, I trapped all of the lower ranked chickens outside, so that the juveniles would be introduced to the highest ranked birds first. In our case, Dolly rules the roost. She was completely calm with them, and later on, she even began to look after them. I plan to do an entire blog entry on Dolly, because she's not the average bird (in fact, she started out as a rooster), so stay tuned for that.

When you finally have everyone together, monitor the situation closely, and carry a stick so that you can quickly chase off anyone who gets too aggressive. A little pecking is to be expected, but intervene at the first sign of mobbing or bullying. I suggest locking the little ones back in the cage after the first few experiments.

When you are finally prepared to leave them to their own devices, and you are sure that the juveniles know how to get in and out of the small door in the cage, you might try the "roost at night" method. For whatever reason, if you sneak in when it's dark put the new birds on the roost, the entire flock tends to be relatively calm when they all wake up together. Normal pecking order activities still take place, but I can tell you from experience that it really does make a difference.

At this point, you can just leave the cage door open in the pen. By the time the juveniles outgrow it, you have yourself an integrated flock.

Our flock, a history

A year and a half ago, my wife (or DW, in backyardchickens.com-speak) and I ordered six one day old baby chicks through the mail. At first, my wife, or Chicken-Mama as she will be referred to hereafter, was skeptical. But when the mailman handed her that little box full of tiny little cheeps, she was completely smitten, and she has been obsessed with our chickens ever since.





















I, on the other hand, am very mature and dispassionate about our flock, which is why I have spent a fortune on a pen inside our barn as well as an outdoor run, secured on all sides with both chicken wire and hardware cloth, covered inside and out, and all surrounded by an electric fence (which I have upgraded for more power, twice). Also, I have a baby monitor set up so that I can check on any strange noises from the house, and I go out to the barn at least once a night to make sure everyone is safe.

As anyone who is kept chickens will tell you, they are highly addictive. If you go to one of the many chickens-discussion boards on the Internet, you will find thousands of people obsessively discussing every obscure aspect of raising chickens as pets. People keep house chickens, some keep tiny little Seramas in birdcages, some built coops that are nicer than my house, and nearly all end up with far more birds in their flock than they ever intended to have.

In this blog, I will periodically give updates on the goings-on of our flock. We have a mixed flock of 15 birds, including 2 Rhode Island Reds, 2 Buff Orpingtons, 2 Easter Eggers, a Jersey Giant, an Australorp, a Dorking, a Silver Laced Wyandotte, 2 Cochin roosters, a Cochin pullet, a Sebright cockerel, and an Old English Game Bantam hen (I hope that's 15!)

Along the way, I hope to share some of the things we've learned about keeping chickens. It's not as easy as it seems, and there are a lot of things to learn if you want to keep your flock safe and healthy. When we first got that tiny little box of chicks in the mail, I never would've guessed that in the first year we would have rushed one of our chickens to a veterinary hospital after she got hit in the head by a rat trap, nursed one of our hens through two weeks of paralysis at the hands of Marek's disease, operated on the feet of two of our hens when they developed bumblefoot (to be fair, Chicken Mama was in charge of the surgery; I was in charge of the freaking out about it!), "escorted" a possum away from the coop with the help of a shovel, and witnessed more ridiculous antics than I can count.