Adding New Chickens to Your Flock

Adding new chickens to your flock can be a stressful endeavor. Read more to learn about how to peacefully integrate new chickens into your backyard flock.

Adding New Chickens when Establishing Pecking Order

Chicken’s, like all animals, have a few set rules when it comes to their natural behavior.

Many of us have heard the term “pecking order” when talking about new people or animals getting to know each other. This often applies to new members joining a group.

With chickens, they literally work to establish a pecking order by participating in behaviors like pecking!

Some chickens will emerge dominate, while others will rank lower on the totem pole. Your chickens will squabble over resources like food, water, roosting space, and pasture space. The more dominate birds expect to have first dibs, while the lower ranking members of the flock are expected to wait.

This is normal and natural for the backyard flock!

When introducing new hens, they will often have their own established pecking order, that has to be sorted out amongst the new additions. The established flock will view the newcomers as lower ranking members right off the bat.

Tips for Success When Adding New Chickens to Your Flock

Fortunately, there are a few ways to work with the chicken’s natural instincts to ease the stress of adding new chickens to your flock.

Add More than One Chicken

To help take the heat off the incoming chickens, plan on adding more than one new chicken at a time. If you’re trying to diversify your flock, you’re likely already planning on adding more than one chicken.

However, if you’re trying to plan ahead now, plan on adding more than one.

Adding more than one chicken to an existing flock will give your new hens some friendly faces in the chicken yard right out of the gate. These birds will likely remain better friends even after the dust has settled!

Consider Size and Breed When Adding New Chickens

Chickens that are establishing a new pecking order use physical force to get their point across. Younger chickens and smaller breeds will have a harder time holding their own.

If you’re adding to a flock of established laying hens, try to choose new members that will grow to be similar size to your older hens. This will help level the playing field, as well as making it harder for your existing chickens to spot a younger chicken to pick on.

For example, if you have heavier egg layers like rhode island reds, you should use caution if you plan on adding smaller birds like silkies. The physical advantage can elevate in-fighting amongst the birds more than adding chickens of similar stature.

Note: If you are adding adult birds from off-farm into your flock, it is a good idea to implement a quarantine period for the new birds: about two weeks. New birds can bring disease, and even if they are healthy, can introduce a disruption to your farm’s natural biome. Also, it will give you a chance to observe if there are any existing injuries or signs of illness they should heal from.

Add Chickens to Your Flock at the Right Age

Another way to level the playing field when adding new members to your flock is to add new chickens at the right age. Chicks have very little defense mechanisms, and most older chickens will not view new chicks brought in as their own.

This can lead to serious injuries or dead chicks, unfortunately, which is not only extremely sad, but a huge waste.

Instead, wait until young birds are at least 8-10 weeks old before adding them to your existing flock.

Give the Chickens Plenty of Room

One of the main resource disputes in integrated flocks is over territory. Chickens are naturally territorial, valuing their current flock mates, and their space, over outsiders’ needs.

To combat this, make sure that all of your chickens have plenty of space to enjoy the great outdoors away from one another.

This way, your older girls won’t feel like a newcomer is encroaching on their turf!

Consider run or pasture space, chicken coop space, and roost bars when providing a safe environment. The more, the better in the first couple of days.

We Choose to raise our chickens on pasture rather than free range which provides enough space but also keeps our chickens in a controlled environment.

If you want to learn more about raising chickens on pasture, you can read more about that here!

Provide Extra Resources

Like with space, make sure to provide enough resources like food and water to your chickens to reduce fighting.

Even if each flock has their own feeder and waterer, consider adding a third to further break up territory disputes.

Of course, you should make sure that these stay full, but mostly you want to ensure that the chickens can steer clear of a territorial hen when need be. Especially at the watering hole!

Integrate the Chickens at Night

Chickens tend to go into a sort of trance at night when they are resting. These otherwise cautious and observant birds become extremely docile, which can be used in your favor!

Consider adding your new member of the flock to the established coop at night when the other chickens won’t notice. Sometimes, this actually tricks even the most territorial hen into missing a new member!

In my opinion, this should be used as the last step to a slower, proper integration process. Because this is not a fool-proof method, you wouldn’t want to wake up to a dead chicken if something went wrong outside of your supervision.

Add Chickens to Your Flock Through a Barrier

Putting a see-through barrier between your existing flock and your new flock is the best way to examine their behavior without a risk of injury. Chickens are naturally curious and will likely spend a lot of time investigating the new faces on the other side.

Through a barrier like chicken wire they can do this safely while they determine who is friend and who is frenemy.

You can also use a large dog crate if you do need to integrate just one or two new hens to the rest of the flock.

What We do to Integrate Our Chickens

We like to spend the first 3-5 days letting the new flock forage in the pasture in their own fence with the older flock in view during the day. We bring them back to their own coop at night.

Once the chickens have gotten to know each other this way, we will let them into the run during the day together. Again, we put them in their own coops for the night.

We also make sure to provide extra feeders and waterers as they further get acquainted.

This step lasts about another week, depending on how it goes. If there is less fighting, we’ll move on to the next step. However, if the chickens aren’t getting along, we continue slowly until things settle down.

After the chickens are mostly peaceful during the day, we will sneak the new girls into the older flocks coop at night when they’re all resting.

At that point, the chickens are usually getting along just fine.

These steps are probably a bit overly cautious, but I find that I have little to no problems because of it!

When to Get Involved When Adding New Chickens to Your Flock

Since chickens do naturally squabble when establishing their pecking order, it’s important not to be overly involved. If you ever expect your chickens to get along, you have to let them figure things out. At least within reason.

Of course chickens are animals, but they aren’t wild animals. Sometimes, as the farmer, the best thing to do is step in if you notice a conflict isn’t being resolved naturally.

If you notice multiple chickens ganging up on one bird, it might be time to step in. Pay close attention for the first few days and watch out for any chickens that might be bleeding or injured. These birds should be removed and given time to heal away from the bullies.

You can try again from the beginning once they are back to their healthy self.

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