Integrating

In theory the caged chicks and mama should be fairly familiar to the other hens by now, after all they share a common space. Of course, theories are just that.

Wanting to make sure that our mama hen Kendra and her chicks were completely back into the regular coop and not inside the cage inside the henhouse before we leave town so our housesitter wouldn’t have to deal with two sets of chickens, I simply opened up the cage, threw down some scratch and kept them all in the coop. For a few minutes this seemed to be working just fine and the other hens were keeping to themselves, busily scratching around for cracked corn bits. But as soon as the scratch was gone, it was apparently pick on Kendra time.

The hen I was most concerned about pecking the chicks is Dawn, our head “rooster.” She is really a hen who has a dominatrix complex and has taken up the duties normally performed by the rooster. However, she seems completely at ease with the new chicks and Kendra, as does our head hen, Buffy and the other oldest hen, Tara. The middle girls, or as I commonly refer to them, the Mean Girls, Anya, Vamp Willow, Darth Rosenberg and Cordelia (which, now that I think about it, they were named appropriately as these were all mean girls on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) were especially aggressive towards Kendra. Every once in a while one of the chicks would get a peck, but nothing out of the ordinary for new chicks, but poor Kendra seemed to be getting the brunt of their wrath.

I’m not sure if it is jealousy or if they all enjoyed their time one up on the pecking order, which with Kendra back, they were challenging to retain their status. I don’t know if Kendra will stick up for herself while the chicks are still relatively small at only four weeks old, but hopefully she’ll put them all back into their place in a couple months when the chicks are bigger and no longer require her protection.

So with them all out together all day yesterday I went to check on if I needed to put mama and babies back into the cage for the night, but instead came upon Kendra with the chicks under her wings on the top roost in the henhouse. Upon further inspection a half an hour later when the rest of the flock went up to roost she was on the lower roost but with the same stance so I left them alone. Today I will see just how well they do and am hoping that by tomorrow the majority of the pecking will stop so I can take the cage out of the henhouse and open up the third nest box. I’m thinking that in the meantime I should still keep their food in the henhouse at least until I run out, just in case the Mean Girls decide they can’t eat from their hopper.