Today we get to move the hens around.
We have the older hens, which are about 2 years old.
The younger hens, that are about 1 year old.
Plus 2 new sets of hens.
These are the ones we’re moving.
We got these 4 Brahma hens in mid April.
Brahma tells you they’re going to get big…real big. But they’re really pretty. They look like they have pants and boots on because of the feathers down the outside of their legs and on their feet.
Today, we’ll move them from they’re enclosed hoop house pen out to grass surrounded by an electric fence.
We want to integrate them in with the older hens. So we’ll put their new pen close to where the older hens’ pen is and hopefully they’ll all get to know each other a little bit.
After a few weeks, we’ll let them out of their new pen and see how things go.
At night they’ll still want to go back into the tractor where they’ve been sleeping for several weeks. So we’ll have to wait until dark, go get them and put them in the older hens’ coop. Hopefully after several days of doing that and them waking up and coming out of the new coop, they’ll get the idea.
Next are the new baby hens.
These are a group of 46 little girls of all different kinds. In some cases we don’t even know what kind they are yet. It’ll be fun figuring that out.
These little girls will go outside for the first time. We’ll put them in the enclosed pen that the Brahma’s were in. That way they’ll stay safe and critters can’t get to them, but they get sun and fresh air.
There’s no grass in there yet, but I’ll pull hands-full and put in there for them for now.
These girls are still pretty little so we want to be able to keep them safe and away from predators.
As they get bigger to where they can’t go through the electric fencing, we’ll set up a pen let them out of the coop and onto grass. Then we’ll just close them up at night so nothing can get to them.
It’s a process getting new chickens.
It’s funny because our older girls and the younger girls really don’t mix much. Once in a great while you might find a younger one near the older ones’ coop, but it’s a rare thing.
Integrating groups of chickens takes time. We’ll go slow so everyone can get to know each other and hopefully everyone will be happy.
We’ll know in a few weeks how they all get along.
Come back and see us soon. We’ll add more pictures here in the Gallery and I’ll post more on facebook.