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Observations on Chicken Behaviour...

Sunday, 17 January 2010

This has been one of the more interesting weeks of chook-keeping that we've had. As you may already know, our game hen Russet has always been extremely timid and is often pecked by the largest 2 of the red hens (Big Red and Copper). The situation had been slowly improving until friday when G left the chook pen door open accidentally. I'm not sure what happened during the day but when we returned home all the chooks were in the backyard, Russet was visibly distressed (but un-injured as far as we could tell) and wouldn't stop making noise (which is extremely unusual, she's usually very quiet). When we rounded the chooks back into the pen the largest 2 kept chasing and pecking Russet for no reason at all. Then out of the blue the 3 large hens (including Sienna) turned on a pigeon that had walked into the coop and tried to eat it!! They managed to swallow a large number of feathers before we could intervene to save it. I guess that explains all the pigeon carcasses in the chicken coop.

We made the executive decision that the 3 big hens had to go. Obviously Russet was never going to improve with 3 crazed pigeon killers as coopmates. We listed an ad and separated Russet from the others as a short term measure. G was of the opinion that Sienna was a good chook and that she and Russet could be friends while I was of the opinion that Sienna was only being nice to Russet because she was smaller than Red and Copper and as soon as they had gone Sienna would be 'queen of the nest' and start pecking Russet too. G decided to test the theory and purchased 2 new game hens (yet to be named!) to form an army with Russet to defend against the gang of 3. My theory turned out to be correct. As soon as Copper and Red were separated Sienna turned nasty. So we halved the coop with the game birds on one side and the gang of 3 on the other side. The two new game birds were about half the size of Russet and things started off well... but soon even they turned on Russet!!

I started to consider that perhaps sometimes my shy behaviour led others to treat me in the same way Russet was being treated! Not that I've ever noticed that but it really made me think... People treat you in the way you behave. And even tiny game hens thought they could beat up on Russet because she was timid. If you demand respect you seem to get it in this world!

Labels: behaviour, chickens

posted by genloz at 2:27 PM 1 Comments