Complicated chicken social structure!

Okay, so we've been raising chickens for less than 2 years. But, oh yeah, we think we know all about chickens now! My recent experience says, "I know nothing."  The chickens have me befuddled. I never know what they are up to.

Here's an example. We have a friend that has too many chickens. She lets them 'free-range' with the consequence that, she can't find all the eggs, and they ultimately turn into more chickens. She ended up with more than 100 on a few acres. We go over every few weeks and round up a bunch (which is another story), keeping the hens for egg-laying and turning the roos into yummy dog food. Now the tricky part - how to separate a young roo from a young hen. I thought I had it all figured out! I noticed that the young roosters had little buds on their legs where their spurs would ultimately be, and the hens did not. Aha! Sure fire tell! Because when they are young, it's hard to tell from the comb, or the tail, and they don't crow yet, etc. Anyway, to continue, we separated what we thought were roosters from hens. We put all the hens into a little pen that had three 'hens' from a previous excursion. We put 8 new ones in. Now, note that only one of the 3 old hens had ever laid eggs.  But I'd only had them for a week or two, and I was being patient. Well, as soon as I put the new hens in, the two brown old 'hens' started fighting with two of the new black ones! And not pecking at each other, the way hens do, but kung-fu fighting, with their feet, like roosters do! I, at any rate, with my extensive 1.75 year history, had never seen anything but a rooster fight like that. We concluded the following:

1. The two brown 'hens' that were originally in the pen are really roosters.
2. The two new black 'hens' are really roosters.

Okay, what should we do? we couldn't leave the four of them together; they were duking it out big time. We decided that, for breeding, if we were going to keep any roos, we wanted the brown speckled ones. Thus the fate of the black 'roosters' was sealed. Into the rooster pen they went. Subsequently butchered for dog food.

Now the bad news. We butchered the roos, and, when we got to these two, big surprise! Bona fide, full-of-eggs, laying hens. Made me sick. And, I felt stupid. Now, we are not even sure if the two brown chickens are roosters or hens..... they may just have been the boss hens challenged by the new hens. It is beyond me why they picked on these two and not any of the others, though. The rest are still getting along just fine. 

This blog is ready for some good news. 

Sigh