New chickens, part 3

Hi, it's Celia again!

I'm going to finish telling you about the new chickens today. If you haven't read parts one and two, go here and here .


The best way to add new chickens to your flock is to sneak them into the hen house at night while the older chickens are sleeping. Then the older ones wake up with the new ones and they get along better. There is still a pecking order that needs to be established, but the new ones don't get pecked so much if they wake up together in the morning. I don't know why, but that's what Mom the chicken psychologist says.

So on the first night we carried the chickens to the hen house. Since they were in a holding pen it was pretty easy. But the second night they were in the main chicken yard. We had to look through the entire chicken yard to find the pullets--all 20 of them. Most were hiding in the picker bush, but some were in the trees, just out of reach. So we got a stick and pushed them out of the tree. We carried each pullet to the hen house and shoved it in the little chicken door.

Mom explained we should use their door and not the people door so they don't get confused. Like I said, she's the Dr. Phil of chickens, so I did what she told me. It was hard. We were tired, and we only had one little flashlight. The last chicken kept running around the chicken yard, refusing to be caught. Mom said forget it and let the pullet sleep in the picker bush. But she did turn on the electric fence to keep predators from getting in the yard. We're hoping that every night more and more of the pullets will go in the hen house on their own, so we won't have to carry them in. It usually takes a week or so for that to happen. Mom said she read that if you turn a light on in the hen house the chickens are more likely to go in, so she might try putting a flashlight in at dusk. If it works, I'll let you know. Anything to get out of digging through a picker bush for runaway pullets! Then the blog would be A Runaway Pullet.