Two roosters in one flock
The theory behind our flock
merger was pretty
simple --- Harvey
Ussery wrote that
you can sometimes get multiple roosters to play nicely together in one
flock if a younger rooster is raised with an older rooster. The
youngster will grow up knowing he's the underdog and won't annoy the
head rooster unduly.
I figured we had a limited
time to give this hypothesis a try before our Light Sussex rooster was
full grown and ready to take on the world (and I also wanted to get the
Sussex out of the shade without putting in all of the effort of
building a third chicken coop.) So we moved our half-grown Light
Sussex (three pullets and a cockerel) into the main coop and shut the
pasture door so they wouldn't go running home.
At first, the experiment
seemed to be headed for failure. The Australorp rooster chased
the younger birds away from the food and the Sussex were too scared to
even go in the coop at night. But every day, the chickens
mellowed out a bit more. Saturday, I felt comfortable enough to
open the pasture door and let them all back out into the floodplain,
where the two flocks foraged separately but in the same vicinity.
Mark tells me the Sussex are even roosting up on the perches in the
coop now. Maybe a second week will see the chickens actually
hanging out together?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Just my pennies worth:
I happen to be completely against multiple roosters. 1 Rooster and his girls, And That's what I advocate to anyone who buys my birds..... There is always going to be tension and squabbles as soon as your not there to impose your dominance. The stress it puts on the flock just isn't worth it.
With hens its very different, It may take a few weeks, maybe be a bit sad to see how mean they can be to each other, but they will eventually settle in to a new pecking order, and be just fine......... Though its best to keep an eye on the two that where at the very bottom of the order in each separate flock, because they tend to have a much rougher time. Ive noticed that those are the ones the rooster in the flock, if you have one, will pick on the longest too.
Why do you have the two roosters anyway, Anna?