I don't know if this is gonna sound weird or stupid, since I'm not 100% familiar with them.

For the past 7-8 years my mum has kept chickens in the backgarden. We had 3. We don't live in a farm or anything but we have a pretty big backgarden. I first brought a chick home when we hatched them in Science class in my first year at high school. When I brought the chick home my mum kept it in the house for a while until it was older to keep outside. At that point she had bought another chicken for company when it was moved outside. Both chickens didn't get on, the other chicken had came from a farm though. And therefore died a week later.

When mum bought another chicken from a farm, it was all fine and both chickens seemed to have no bother. The following year my cousin brought a chick home and ofcourse we took it in because we had 2 already.

So skip to last year and the chicken I brought home has already died. And now just last week the other one has died. So now we've got one hen on it's own.

Sorry for the long post, the question I'm pretty much asking is, can a hen be lonely on it's own? There hasn't been any problems so far, no squawking or anything. My mum's friend has 3 or 4 chickens as well and mum was planning on giving the hen to her so it has other chickens to mix with but she's worried that other chickens may attack it because it's not been mixed with a lot of chickens, so I guess they're pretty tamed in a sense. I guess because the chickens were almost like "pets" in a sense, she's worried about how it will be amongst new hens.

Hens get lonely and depressed without company.

If hens do not know how to behave mind, they can be seen as freaks.

Ah I thought so. Maybe it would be better to try mix the hen with other hens

Hens are flock animals. They go around in a group - or sub-groups of a few who've got "something in common" which might just be the time they were added to a flock. Adding one to an existing flock is always going to be stressful for the new arrival while pecking order is established. Particularly in a small flock where she's highly visible, the newbie might not be accepted.

Additionally, they're prey animals which means they are instinctively uncomfortable and stressed being singletons because if there's a predator in the vicinity, they're "it".

However, swapping chickens around is fraught with potential difficulties - transferring disease that one chicken happily lives with to a flock that isn't immune, for eg.

There is a lot of useful information in this link:

http://poultrykeeper.com/chickens/ge...-chickens.html

In your mother's particular circumstances, if she doesn't actively want to stop having chickens, I'd get this chicken a companion - a point of lay adult - but she might want to keep it separate for about a month in case it is carrying any disease. If you get two new chickens, the existing chicken might find it gets bullied by the two newbies who'll gang up.

Then, if she wants to avoid the likelihood of ending up with a singleton again, in a few months she could get another two point of lay birds and they're likely to settle in okay with the existing two. Then if any one dies, the survivor would just carry on with the other two.

They're flock animals, of course she'll get lonely.