#poultry behavior

[homeofhousechickens]

When broody hens start distancing themselves from their chicks the first chicks they kick out of the group/brood are typically the cockerels. This is done for many reasons but a big one is probably avoiding the hormonal ire of the teenagers whenever they start to hit sexual maturity. Young, randy, inexperienced cockerels are a nuisance to hens and pullets so they tend to start pushing them away from the rest of the brood once they start showing cockish traits.

In the picture Princess Cream is standing on their platform and brooding two young pullets. Seahawk a young cockerel is not invited to this cuddle pile so he must roost somewhere else, and that place is their rope perch which is under the platform.

I actually never noticed this behavior before intill i was looking up papers on red jungle fowl behavior and i saw it mentioned that males are typically kicked out of clutches first before the hens. I then looked it up on domesticated chicken forums and discovered this is common in domesticated chickens as well.

If anyone has any other cool stories or pictures of this behavior feel free to share!

And keep in mind every chicken is different and their are outliers a hen who may kick out cockerels can be different from a hen who will brood anything or anyone and sometimes hens will bond closely with their sons and still brood them even into adult hood!

[homeofhousechickens]

I’ve seen a few videos of a juvenile pigeon’s voice cracking, which is ADORABLE, but also kind of strange, since I had previously thought this only happened with humans. Are there any other birds or animals that have that awkward transition between juvenile and adult vocalization?

YES it is so funny when baby chickens go through their three main voice changes

The first stage is the chick peeps where they mostly vocalize by peeping and beeping

Then it’s the pullet and cockerel (teenage) stage where they have access to more noises but are still peeping mostly

Then the adult stage where they can no longer physically make the peeping noise and instead it is replaced by clucking and other vocalizations

Personally the stage between teen and adult is the funniest like my young pullet Nebby is insisting on peeping like a chick but she has developed a VERY DEEP voice so soon she will start clucking instead of peeping because it will be more comfortable

(I’ll try to post a video for you later) :)

[homeofhousechickens]

“A fun sick study on 'head clue' in new born chicks”

via Sigrid van Dort‎ (these are her words not mine)

We all know that the first person a baby goose or duck is seeing, becomes the 'mother'. How does this work in chickens?

We  also directly tested preferences for specimens whose head region is visible compared to ones whose head region was occluded (covered). To clarify whether chicks are sensitive to species-specific information, we  employed specimens of female mallard ducks and of a mammalian predator, the polecat (they thought chicks are daft!!1!).

Well, it is time to buy a chicken mask, because it is not your handsome looks you display on social media that make the chicks will see as their mum. Maybe painting your nose red will help?

The inborn clue of chicks is clearly the head of the mother and it should be a bird head too.

From the research:

Unlearned tendencies to approach animate (alive looking) creatures are of great adaptive value, especially for nidifugous (out of the nest walkers) social birds that need to react to the presence of potential social companions shortly after hatching.  

Domestic chicks’ preferences for taxidermized (stuffed) hens provided the first evidence of social predispositions. However, the nature of the stimuli  eliciting this predisposition is not completely understood.

Here we explore the unlearned preferences of visually naïve domestic chicks for taxidermized animals. Visually naive chicks were tested for their approach preferences between a target stimulus (an intact stuffed animal whose head region was clearly visible) and a control stimulus.

After confirming the predisposition for the intact stuffed fowl hen (Exp. 1), we found an analogous preference for a taxidermized, young domestic chick over a severely scrambled version of the same stimulus, whose body  structure was completely disrupted, extending to same-age individuals the results that had been obtained with taxidermized hens (Exp. 2). 

Chicks showed a preference for the duck stimulus whose wings have been covered over a similar stimulus whose head region has  been covered, providing direct evidence that the visibility of the head region of taxidermized models drive chicks’ behaviour in this test, and that the attraction for the head region indeed extends to females of  other bird species (Exp. 3).

However, no similar preference was obtained with the polecat stimuli (Exp. 4, duh). We thus confirmed the presence of unlearned visual preferences for the head region in newly-hatched chicks, though other factors can limit the species-generality of the phenomenon.

More details:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0222079