05/11/2026
If you have chickens, or you’re thinking about getting chickens, please remember this very foolish, tragic mistake I made.
Rooster to hen ratio matters. There should be at least 10 hens per rooster.
Last year we hatched 9 eggs in an incubator. When you hatch your own eggs, expect at least half to be male. That means you need a plan for what to do with the excess males. At the time, I had 1 rooster and 40ish hens, so it was fine. But one by one, 4 of those hatchlings turned into roosters. Add in a few hen losses for various reasons, and over time my rooster to hen ratio slipped to 5 roosters, 30 something hens.
It starts small. A few missing feathers on the hens’ backs. Roosters take a little time to settle down and learn to be gentle, so I thought I was being patient. Then spring comes, hormones surge, and suddenly half the flock has bare backs.
A chicken with no feathers on its back is vulnerable to hot/ cold/ sunburn/ bug bites/ bullying/ injuries from being pecked, scratched, etc. Any wounds can become infected, and kill your hen.
So I bought some protective “hen saddles” off the internet, and recruited Shea Quick Vickers and Mindy Wolsifer to help me put them on the hens one night last week. I’m so grateful to these ladies, it was so much easier with extra hands.
For one sweet hen, it was too late. We lifted up her wing to find a gruesome wound that had been hidden from sight. It appears that one of the roosters spurs had sliced open her side, leaving a large hole into her body cavity, and it was badly infected. I made the decision to euthanize.
I knew the hen to rooster ratio mattered, I let it go on for far too long, and my flock suffered and my hen died as a direct result of my delay and inaction.
For the health of our flock, we will be doing a hard cull later this week. I probably won’t post pictures. If you keep chickens, or you’re planning to keep chickens, please learn from my mistakes.
