You need to identify your chickens: Wing Bands and Leg Bands

Keeping chickens? If you have several members of your flock that are the same breed, sex, and color variety, you have the problem of telling them apart. Maybe one of your identical chickens has lost a toe, or another is friendlier than the rest. But that's not enough. You need to be able to tell your chickens apart as individuals. For that, you need wing bands.

I have been using wing bands for some years now. For a while I had 3 purebred Buff Brahma roosters and 2 or 3 crossbred roos I was keeping for various reasons. Then I had some roos die.

The spring after I noticed one of my 3 purebred Brahma roos was beating up the others. I checked wing bands and I found out the mean rooster wasn't one of my purebreds after all, but a half-Brahma crossbred. He must have inherited his feisty nature from the other half of the cross--- pure Brahmas are very gentle, and often can't be raised in the same brooder as other, more aggressive breeds.

Wing bands are a permanent identification solution. For years I used metal tags--- I think the brand was 'Hasco' which were sent to me by the government as official government ear tags. But they gave my sheep and goats ear infections and most had to be removed. But they worked fine for chicken and duck wing bands.

Since I'm all but out of those I purchased some Jiffy bands, which come in several colors. They are lighter in weight and I don't suppose are as good for tagging adult animals newly acquired. But they can be used to tag chicks once they reach about a month old or so.

I originally kept my list of chickens and their wing band numbers on scraps of paper kept in the plastic tool box where I kept the boxes of bands and their applicator.  But now that I'm more serious about breeding rare breed chickens, I have a binder with pages and different breed groups are listed on different pages.

Wing bands are grand, but you can't see the wing bands unless you catch the bird. I use spiral leg bands also. My current system: purebred birds of the breeds I am breeding have color of wing band based on their breed. For Chanteclers, that is brown. Birds also have a second band on that leg to indicate their year of hatch.

I use the same system of year colors that I use for my sheep/goat ear tags, based on the Australian system. Here are the colors for the next few years:

White: 2017
Orange: 2018
Green: 2019
Purple: 2020
Yellow: 2021
Red: 2022
Blue: 2023
Black: 2024

And then you start over with white. The advantage of this is when birds get older you can identify which group to round up to make the management decision on which breeder birds get sold, which get made into chicken soup, and which get to stay and breed on your farm for another year.

Another reason it's good to be able to identify your hens individually--- hens go broody. That's a good thing because they can brood chicks, but you don't want them broody too often. If they are banded, when you see a broody hen on the nest, just check her number. In her official records, write the word 'broody' and the date. I raise breeds that are known for having broodies. If a hen goes broody too often, I wouldn't want to use her as a breeder because I don't want to breed too much broodiness into the line. But I do want birds that go broody sometimes. It's nice to keep accurate records, so you can make informed decisions about things like that!