lt34102 ANY bird that lays eggs could possibly experience issues. Hybrids are great for first time owners.

Taimur Shahzad your chicks still need heat day and night at least until they are 5 wks. I would wait a fortnight before integrating them. Please read the articles on backyard chickens for integration.

charlie and what about 9 months old chickens.. will they kill the chicks?

charlie i dont have any heat lamps. 2 of them died.

Taimur Shahzad they need heat. You will have to buy a heat lamp or heat plate or DIY a mama heating pad, 22c is too cold, their growth will be severely stunted if they don’t all die. They should not be integrated for at least two weeks yet. You will need to make a smaller pen in your run and let the older ones get used to them, after two weeks, you can let them out.

charlie thankyou so much for your help

Since you have no adult chickens that you will be eventually integrating this brood with, I think you should be okay. I would keep them isolated for about three to five days before mixing them -- but that really depends on how old they were when you brought them home. If they were already eating out of a feeder without a problem you should be good to go.

That's very true. Any bird can be socialized and in the years since this video was made we noticed as much behavioral variation between different hatcheries as the different breeds. We purposefully tried not to socialize our birds since that seemed to give them a better chance against the predators.

In these years since we made this video it seems to me that the hatchery makes as much or a bigger difference than the breed. I've only tried 4 different hatcheries and out of those the best results for us were with McMurray. What you mention is common and is why most commercial layers are culled after 18 months or so.

Guess I just need to get with that same program of rotating them out more frequently too. I am searching for the best small flock mix combination now. I would prefer if the egg production didn't spike so much at one time of the year, and fall off to almost nothing at all the rest of the year. A mix that has a couple of birds that produce well in the fall/winter, (even if they don't do quite as well as others in the summer.) And a couple of others that are just egg laying machines the rest of the year. (But then, aren't we all looking for that?) Might be a topic for another video.........?

My chickens got used to the dog we have a blue healer and he loved them he always protected them to

yack f zay ..s

Really depends on the temp. We've done chicks in the barn with two heat lamps in December a bunch of times, but at that point it didn't really go below 30f. If you're expecting single digits like we are here in NJ my gut says they are too young right now. They need to be kept around 90f in the beginning. I think you should probably play it safe and go for the house.

I have another video on moving a brood into an adult flock. It's not about avoiding sickness and disease as much as carnage through suffocation and attack. Although nearly all of our moves went off without a problem a few went spectacularly wrong. In the worst we lost 17 birds out of 44 overnight. It was a hard lesson.