dirt / By Amy Stewart

The Feathered Killers

It’s chick season again, so for God’s sake please protect the little ones from your murderous hens

(April 22, 2010)  So here we are in chick season. Again. They’re at the feed stores right now — just follow the plaintive peeping sounds and there they will be, all fluffy and adorable under the heat lamps. They are impossible to resist, so don’t even try. Chicks are easy to raise, as long as you follow a few basic rules. Keep them warm. Give them cute names. Don’t tell the cat. Teach them tricks. That sort of thing.

Over the years I’ve tried to offer whatever backyard chicken-raising advice I could based on the adventures of my own small flock. (You can find those columns on the Journal‘s Web site — just type “chickens” in the search box.) But this year I’ve encountered a whole new set of chicken challenges: the difficulty of introducing new chicks to an existing flock. I only hope you can learn from my mistakes.

GALLERY >

We started out three years ago with four hens. One died — of cancer, which is strange but not, I suppose, entirely unexpected, considering the fact that chicks seem to all come from the relatively limited gene pool of a couple hatcheries in central California — leaving us with three. They’ll be laying fewer eggs as they get older. So we thought it would be a good time to add two new chicks.

This year we chose another Ameraucana, the breed that lays blue and green eggs, and a lovely blonde Buff Orpington. They’re known for their placid dispositions — a Buff likes nothing more than to sit on your lap or on a clutch of eggs. All our hens are named after First Ladies; we named the Ameraucana Ida (after Ida McKinley) and we named the Buff Lady Bird.

All was well for the first seven weeks. They lived in our downstairs bathroom under a heat lamp. On warm days we took them outside for short bouts so they could meet the older hens and get used to being out there with them. Sometimes the older birds would rear up, fluff their feathers and flap their wings to scare the little ones off, but that was about the worst of it. Dolley, the leader of the pack and another Ameraucana, lunged at them a couple of times to let them know who was boss, but never actually drew blood. And this is important, because even a small injury can be dangerous for a chick. Chickens are attracted to the color red and will pick at a wounded chick out of instinct. So we wanted them to get exposed to the older hens, but we didn’t want them to get even the smallest injury.

Roaming around the backyard together seemed to work fine, but what would happen when they had to be locked up? We put them in the coop with the older hens a few times and stood around to watch how they did in close quarters. So far, it seemed okay. They basically ignored each other. Nobody got pecked. We read all the advice about how chicks should be kept in a separate wire enclosure for a while so that they could look at each other without getting too close. But building yet another structure would be expensive and complicated, so we hoped that this gradual get-to-know-you approach would work.

And then we made our terrible mistake.

One morning we put the chicks out in the coop with the adults, watched them for a little while, and, believing that all was well, left to run a couple of errands. I was gone 45 minutes. When I got back, Ida was hopping around in the coop, but Lady Bird was face-down on the ground, looking like a little dead creature. When I got closer, I saw that she had a horrific head wound. One of our hens had pecked her so badly that all of the feathers and skin on the back of her head was ripped off — an area about the size of a quarter — exposing a mess of veins and whatever lies underneath skin. Flesh. Matter.

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