“But don’t they just fly away?”

We field a lot of questions about homesteading, and this is one of the more common answers when people ask about the poultry. The answer is that they can, so we clip their wings to keep them in their pen. Most people understand what wing clipping entails, but others wince, not realizing that clipping a bird’s wings is no more painful than getting a haircut. And, if you want to keep your birds out of trouble, it’s necessary.

The chicks we bought in September are now young adults, and they’ve grown their flight feathers in. This means that they can now fly out of their pen as easily as one might climb a flight of stairs, so it’s time to clip their wings.

This process is simply removing the bird’s flight feathers. Here is one of our Ameraucana pullets (young hen that hasn’t started laying) below with her wing splayed out so you can see:

Notice the largest feathers at the end of her wing? Here’s a second picture from our other Ameraucana; her coloring makes it easier to distinguish the flight feathers from the others:

All you do is cut the feathers off with a pair of sharp scissors. Don’t cut too close because you don’t want to cut into any of the capillaries that are attached to the feather and cause for the bird to bleed. It should look like this when done:

See? You can do it on your own, or you can enlist the help of someone else. Doing it on my own while posing for pictures took 5 minutes to do 6 birds. It’s very low time commitment. This has to be done once when the birds are juveniles, a second time when they reach adulthood, and then only once a year after that. Indeed, you may not ever have to do it again, as our Rhode Island Reds last year seemingly ‘forgot’ that they could fly and didn’t attempt it even after their flight feathers grew back in.

One last note, look at the feathers of our Barred Rock pullets:

See how there are gaps in her flight feathers? This is because she is young and she hasn’t finished growing them out. If you look closely you can see that there are some smaller flight feathers growing in that will soon fill in those gaps. Barred Rocks must be slower to mature than the other breeds, because they were the only two like that. I clipped their wings as they were still letting themselves out of the pen, albeit not as easily as their flock mates. I will check again in a few weeks once the rest of them grow in to clip them again, as those few feathers will probably be all they need to give them the oomph to get out again.

That’s it! Nothing anybody with a pair of scissors can’t do.