An isolation coop is a must
for every chicken-owner.  Hopefully you’ll seldom have to use it,
but if a chicken is being picked on mercilessly by the flock, having a
spot to put the downtrodden hen can mean the difference between life
and death.



It’s sometimes hard to
tell what started the pecking.  We’ve only had to separate three
hens from the flock in the last five years or so — one was old and
coming to a natural end of her life, one had been overmated by a
rooster so she started to bleed, and this most recent hen somehow
became our current rooster’s punching bag.  We considered culling
the rooster, but he’s treating all of his other ladies with gentlemanly
aplomb, so I figured he was probably picking up some weakness on the
part of the hen.



An isolation coop is a
sort of time out for everyone involved.  It’s a cool, quiet place
where your picked on bird can heal from her wounds and build back her
spunk — a spare coop or chicken
tractor works well, but seriously injured birds can even be put in
a cardboard box.  This is one of the reasons we like to have a
spare chicken waterer
around — you can just toss some food on the ground for the loner each
day, but she’ll need fresh, clean water to regain her strength.



If the hen recovers
enough, she can be reintegrated into the flock.  Chickens
naturally pick on weak or sick members, but they generally forget their
bad feelings if the hen reappears a week later, back in tip-top
health.  Unfortunately, in many cases, the problem doesn’t heal,
in which case you have to choose whether to keep a loner hen around or
cull her for the good of the flock.  Our hen is still in the
rehabilitation stage — hopefully next week, we’ll see if she’s ready
for reintegration.

If
you need a cute time drain during your work day, you might want to drop
by our new chicken cam.  We currently have the
lens trained on our six week old chicks (who are starting to look more
like young chickens).  We’ll be swapping things around in late
April when our next set of chicks hatch, at which point there will be
much more fluff on screen.



We’ve kept the chick cam
in the brood
coop because that’s the area that sees the most action, but we’re
also open to suggestions.  Would you rather watch the chicks forage
in the forest pasture,
even if the view was chick-free for about 60% of the time?  We
could even point the camera at the chicken waterer, but that seemed a little too
self-serving.  You tell us what you’d like to see!