Have just bought two more chickens 20 weeks old and have put them with two original ones who are now 9 month old, the older ones are bullying the new ones. who are now too scared to come out of the hen house, any ideas please. Its only been 24 hours

It depends on how severe the bullying is - not leaving the house tells me its quite nasty.

Is it possible to make a small, temporary run that can be put next to it? It would allow both sets of chickens to get to know each other before they get mixed.

Or you can move the feeders and drinkers down to the far end of the run and place some smaller ones near the front of the house for the new ones. 

Failing that, you can give them time to sort it - just like any animals, there has to be a hierarchy and they're just establishing theirs.

I agree with with rossymons in every respect.

Given that you should really have let them see each other, whilst seperated, from the start: The best you can now do is spread the feed trays around, introducing visual obstructions if possible, and wait for them to sort out the pecking order.

Don't worry about anything however, we all learn a lot from each other on this forum.

 

      It's called pecking order, if the bullying isn't too bad the older ones will stop in a couple of days hopefully, we always leave them all in for a few days, when new ones are brought in, this seems to make them settle together quicker.good luck.

 Talking pecking orders. We had until recently a Cochin cockerel that was trying to establish his place in the pecking order by attacking my wife at 5ft 1inch and ME at 6 feet 3inches. He used to attack her full on about shoulder height as soon as she was looking the other way and used to get me right behind the knees!

For the future, any suggestions from you knowledgable chaps? We swapped him for a quieter one.

Corky please let me know if the living of fresh air works it's the one thing we have plenty of here in Vienne, France!

adeplume,try as we may, there are a few other things needed to live on, but having the fresh air and good views certainly make living and farming much more enjoyable.

We had a similar Barnevelder cockeral to the same to me - he'd go at me with spurs and almost rake them down my shin! He calmed down in the end when we got him some more females. One of them went broody and he went to check on his offspring and got a beakful from their mother!

We went to a talk years ago by Katie Thear, who has written several books on keeping hens. She suggested that hens were territorial and therefore the older hens were likely to be dominant over the new arrivals. By putting the older hens into a second henhouse and the new hens into the main henhouse for a day or so, the older hens were put at a psychological disadvantage before they were introduced to the new hens at the far side of a fence. Both lots of hens could then housed together with little disruption, I think this assumes that the numbers of old and new hens were roughly similar.

We just tend to keep the new ones islolated for a week or so to make sure they are healthy and get used to coming out of the henhouse during the day if sourced from "free range" farms, before introducing them at night to the present inmates.

Mum recieved some new hens for Mothers day but she got them a few days before. They got a bit bullied and then wouldn't leave the house. The bullying has appeared to stop, but they wouldn't leave the house so I suggested moving them outside and shutting the door so they're locked outside. The bullying had stopped and now they go out happy as larry.