Clipping wings

[OhWesternWind]

Hello everyone! We will have had our hens for two weeks come weekend, so we are planning on letting them out into the garden then.

Dp is very keen on them having their wings clipped before we do this, but won't do it himself so I imagine it will be a job for me! Any tips on how to go about this? I am imagining that you just trim the large flight feathers to the wing tip, but I don't know if this is right and if you have to trim all of them right the way along, how much to trim them (to the edge of the actual wing?) and if you have to do both sides. Any help much appreciated - and also any help on how to get the hens back to their run!

Only do one side - it only works well when their balance is affected (but some hens still manage to flap/scramble over fairly high fences even with a clipped wing!)

If you hold the wing out, clip the primary flight feathers back so they are about the same length as the secondaries.
Don't clip the secondaries at all, as this can stop the chicken from keeping warm at night!

The feathers will grow back, but they may not need clipping again, as chickens are animals of habit, and they may not bother trying to escape once they know it's tricky :)

Trim the first 8 to about a cm before the shorter feathers. Just do one side. You may need him to hold the hen whilst you deal with the feather.

See the omlet website for a step by step picture guide.

I haven't clipped any of my chickens' wings - i think it's a bit mean, depriving them of teh little tiny bit of flight they get!

instead , we surrounded the edge of the garden with flimsy chicken wire - they don't try to fly over it because they think they won't have anything to grab onto if they can't make it the whole way.