Author: Anna & Mark

Is it safe to mix chicks of
different ages together?  I came across this conundrum while
trying to decide if it was okay to buy
some slightly younger chicks to keep our homegrown chick company.  I know that chickens
are prone to aggression when presented with a newcomer, and that bigger
and stronger chickens can mercilessly pick on those smaller and weaker
than themselves.  But there are a few tricks you can use if you
need to mix together chicks of different ages:

• Dilute aggression by adding
  several younger chicks to a flock of a few older chicks. 
  This is what we did, putting 16 two-day-old chicks in with our single
  four-day-old chick.  Our chick pecked at the youngsters a bit the
  first day, but there were just so many of them that he didn’t cause any
  real trouble.
• Have them meet on neutral turf. 
  Territoriality can be part of the problem when introducing new chickens
  to a flock.  I chose to move our chick out to his new home in the
  chicken coop at the same time I introduced the new chicks so that the
  terrain was new to everybody.
• Give the chickens enough space. 
  When mixing chicks, place them in a brooder large enough that they have
  room to run away if they’re being bullied.
• Give them something to do. 
  Food and water are much more interesting than bullying, so you might be
  able to bypass trouble just by giving the two sets of chicks something
  to work on.  Our chicken
  waterer is just as effective at keeping chicks busy as it is at
  occupying adult hens.
• Introduce new chicks in the
  evening.  By chance, we happened to get our new chicks just
  a couple of hours before dusk, and that time really worked in our
  favor.  Soon, everybody wanted to cuddle up under the brooder and
  nap, and by morning all the problems seemed to have ironed themselves
  out.
• Watch the flock for at least an
  hour after mixing.  In the worst case scenario, chicken
  bullying can be deadly if several big chicks beat up on one small
  chick.  Be prepared to separate the flocks, if necessary. 
  That said, try to be a bit calmer than I was.  My heart was in my
  throat every time our older chick pecked at another chick’s feet or
  eyes the first evening, but I later realized that the little chicks
  weren’t being hurt.  You’ll be able to tell if the younger chick
  is in pain because he will squeak, cower, and run away.  If he
  shrugs it off and just keeps pecking up food beside the “bully”, you’re
  being over-protective and need to leave them alone to work out a new
  pecking order.

Less than 24 hours
later, all 17 of our chicks were acting like a flock.  I’m glad to
have this trick up my sleeve in case I have other single chicks hatch
in need of flockmates.

My original goal for 2011 was
to hatch out four batches of ten chicks apiece using our broody hen.  When she fell down on
the job, I moved on to plan B — hatch out five batches of seven
chicks apiece using our Brinsea
Mini Advance Incubator. 
In both cases, I hoped to come up with five good layers with prime
foraging genes to replace our aging hens this fall and put the rest of
the chickens in the freezer at broiler age.



Unfortunately, there
seems to be a steep learning curve involved in hatching our own chicks,
and we only came up with one homegrown chick during our first
trial.  I was starting to feel pressed for time, worried that any
pullets we hatched wouldn’t start laying this fall, so we went out and
bought 16 locally hatched Black Australorps.  I’ve heard very good
things about Black Australorps’ abilities as foragers, so I figure it
won’t hurt to give a few hens a try in our flock.



But we don’t want to give up
on hatching our own, so we decided to sink some more money into the
project and buy a Brinsea Octagon 20 Advance Incubator.  This
larger incubator will hold up to 24 chicken eggs, hedging my bets so
that even if I continue to have abysmal hatch rates, I’ll at least end
up with multiple living chicks.  The incubator also has a humidity
reading on the digital display and a vent to allow me to adjust the
internal air flow, which should help fix one of the major causes of our
low
hatch rate during
round 1.



We saved up our best
foragers’ eggs for our second round of incubation, but also ordered a
dozen Cuckoo Maran eggs from Golden Willow Farm
and Hatchery. 
One of my role models, Harvey
Ussery, uses Cuckoo
Marans to hatch all of his chicks since this heritage breed is a great
brooder and mother, so I’m hoping we’ll get at least two broody hens
out of the deal.  Maybe in 2012, the incubators will just be a
backup to natural hatching under a broody hen.