Poultry Record Keeping

Keeping track of key information about your flock over time can help you identify health problems earlier and make sure your veterinarian will have all the right details to more easily diagnose your birds.  In this section, we will cover the basics of making sure you can identify the individual birds in your flock and what information is helpful to records so that we can better manage their care.

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Bird Identification

Having some form of identification for your birds can make it easier to tell the difference between similar looking members of your flock to keep better track of who is doing what and to provide a means of identifying you as the owner of your birds if they ever get lost.

Temporary Identification

Leg bands are the most common way of identifying chickens and have the advantages of being painless and easy to apply as well as letting you easily see who is who from a distance if you use different coloured bands. They work best when applied to both legs since they can break and fall off over time. You also need to be careful about making sure they don’t become too tight or too loose, particularly with growing birds that are rapidly changing in size.

You may also have heard of wing bands, which are metal or plastic tags that are pierced through the webbing in the wing. They are less likely to need replacement over time, but require special applications to put them on, cause pain when they are implanted, and can damage the tendons or muscles if put in the wrong location on the wing.

Permanent Identification

The best form of permanent identification is to have a microchip implanted.  This is a small electronic device about the size of a grain of rice that is implanted under the skin usually under the skin on the chicken’s back where the wings meet. 

Microchips are relatively painless to implant and are made of inert materials that won’t cause your chicken any long-term harm.  The microchip has an associated ID number that can be read by a scanner and linked to your details in a national database.

In New Zealand, this is the New Zealand Companion Animals Register (NZCAR).   If your chicken ever gets lost or separated from you, having a microchip makes it easier for them to be returned.

Record Keeping

Keeping track of certain details about your flock can make it much easier to manage their routine care, recognise and treat illnesses, and deal with unexpected emergencies like fires, floods, earthquakes, or disease outbreaks.  Here is a basic list of what you and your veterinarian would need to know:

Flock Details

Management Details

Production Details

Medical and Behavioural Problems

Ideally, these records should be kept electronically to make it easier to track trends that could point to a problem and share critical information with your veterinarian to manage problems more effectively.