Tagging chickens

[La finca Booyong]

hi, we have a pasture raised egg farm in Australia. My question is
How do you all keep track of your chickens. I want to tag my chickens. What are your thoughts on putting small numbered cattle tags in the chickens wings. This way each chicken has a number and I can keep track of them?

 

[sylviethecochin]

Er...

The recognized method is usually leg-bands?
Putting a tag through a chicken's wing would be like putting one through your arm? Severely painful and to be avoided? Sort of like the difference between piercing your ear and your ankle?

Okay, picture this. You have a whole roast chicken in front of you. The wing is meat and bone. That's the entire chicken wing. Everything else is feathers. A tag would sort of slip between the feathers.

 

[La finca Booyong]

I understand, was thinking somewhere like the feathers but hadn't given it much thought. i have a few leg bands on them but they aren't easy to see when you have 500 chickens all around you. just wanted to try and find some way to identify the chickens from looking down on them or from a distance individually. so i know what one is doing what

 

[Zoomie]

Welcome to BYC!

Leg bands that have all the info printed on them are really awesome. You do have to catch the bird to know all their vitals: year hatched, lineage etc. A friend of mine got colored elastic bands, that are specially made for chickens. You can get them in various sizes, and you can get them in bags with lots of different colors in one bag. So what she did, was use a certain color on the left leg to mean something, and a different color on the right leg to mean something else and so on and so forth. You could easily make up your own system, and then just band them accordingly. Maybe if one is a really good layer, put two green bands on her right leg etc. Whatever you need to know about them. Good luck!

 

[La finca Booyong]

my biggest problem is that we have 500 hens at the moment and by January we will have over a 1000. i would like to try and keep track of each bird with number. so i know if any go missing and what ones are the escapee

 

[sylviethecochin]

I think any sort of clip would fall off--maybe something like a saddle?

 

[rosemarythyme]

Actually there are wing bands made for chickens and there's supposed to be a proper spot to fasten them so that they don't cause issues for the bird. I don't know much about them past that so hopefully someone will pipe in who has experience with them.

Leg bands are an option but you'll need to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't get tight or loose to the point where they'd catch on things.

 

[aart]

Wing banding is common, just not on backyard flocks.
Browse thru these threads, I know I've seen a couple good examples of how to wing band.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/search/9866300/?q=Wing+band&t=post&o=relevance&c[title_only]=1