Picking up new chicks

Later this week I am picking up ameraucana chicks and blue laced red wyndotte chicks. They are being sold as straight run and I can only keep the pullets and later on will have to sell the cockerels. How many chicks of each breed should I pick up to guarantee one pullet?

Also at what age should I introduce the pullets to the ladies that I already have?

The general odds are 50/50, so you should pick out at least twice as many and hope you are lucky. It's all a gamble.

How soon you integrate may depend on your coop set up and how long you may have to wait to discern genders.
You may be able to weed out the boys at about 5-6 weeks, or may need to wait until 3-4 months.
How much space you have, if and how you can divide it, can play a big part in how you manage grow out, culling, and integration.



Here's some notes I've taken on integration that I found to be very helpful.......
......take what applies or might help and ignore the rest.
See if any of them, or the links provided at the bottom, might offer some tips that will assist you in your situation:

Integration of new chickens into flock.

Consider medical quarantine:
BYC Medical Quarantine Article
Poultry Biosecurity
BYC 'medical quarantine' search

It's about territory and resources(space/food/water). Existing birds will almost always attack new ones.
Understanding chicken behaviors is essential to integrating new birds into your flock.

Confine new birds within sight but physically segregated from older/existing birds for several weeks, so they can see and get used to each other but not physically interact. Integrating new birds of equal size works best.

The more space, the better. Birds will peck to establish dominance, the pecked bird needs space to get away. As long as there's no blood drawn and/or new bird is not trapped/pinned down, let them work it out. Every time you interfere or remove new birds, they'll have to start the pecking order thing all over again.

Multiple feed/water stations. Dominance issues are most often carried out over sustenance, more stations lessens the frequency of that issue.

Places for the new birds to hide out of line of sight and/or up and away from any bully birds.

In adjacent runs, spread scratch grains along the dividing mesh, best of mesh is just big enough for birds to stick their head thru, so they get used to eating together.

Another option, if possible, is to put all birds in a new coop and run, this takes the territoriality issues away.

For smaller chicks I used a large wire dog crate right in the coop for the smallers. I removed the crate door and put up a piece of wire fencing over the opening and bent up one corner just enough for the smallers to fit thru but the biggers could not. Feed and water inside the crate for the smallers. Make sure the smallers know how to get in and out of the crate opening before exposing them to the olders. this worked out great for me, by the time the crate was too small for the them to roost in there(about 3 weeks), they had pretty much integrated themselves to the olders. If you have too many smallers to fit in a crate you can partition off part of the coop with a wire wall and make the same openings for smallers escape.

Best example ever of chick respite and doors by azygous
https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/1069595/introducing-chicks-to-adults#post_16276224

Read up on integration..... BYC advanced search>titles only>integration
This is good place to start reading:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/a/adding-to-your-flock

You cannot get a guarantee. Odds just don’t work that way. I’ll list some odds of getting at least one female:
1 chick – 50%
2 chicks – 75%
3 chicks – 87.5%
4 chicks – 93.75%
5 chicks – 97%
6 chicks – 98.4%

As you can see the more you get the better your chances. But I recently hatched five chicks from eggs that had a 50-50 chance of having a red chick or a black chick. All five were red. So I hit the 3% chance. One time I got 6 straight run Buff Orp chicks from Cackle. All six were female. I hit the 1.6% odds.

Very few of my hatches (can’t get any more straight run than that) are actually 50-50. Most seem to be 2/3 one gender or the other and that is normally with over 15 chicks per incubation. Over time it averages out but in any one hatch it can be really skewed.

I’d suggest you get three of each. No guarantees of course but your odds really are pretty good. And it should be pretty easy to sell pullets if you get an excess.