Advice on possible rooster

[aart]

Not the best pictures, but what I could get tonight after I got home from work. Thoughts?

That's looks to be a triple rowed pea, and pretty colorful for 6 wks...I'd say cockerel, but EE's have such varied genes there's often no telling for sure until they crow.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Looks male to me. As Aart said, it’s still a little early to be sure.

Clue #1 – color of the comb. That looks red while a pullet’s comb should be more yellow at that age.
Clue #2 – leg. Males often have heavier, thicker legs than pullets.

How much room do you have for their “free-range” time together? Usually the more room you have the less problems you have, although since they are living animals you can always get exceptions.

At six weeks the older hens should still see them all as chicks, not yet breaking them down by sex. It’s instinctive that an older chicken outranks an immature chicken in the pecking order and isn’t shy about enforcing those pecking order rights if a chick invades their personal space. If you have enough room, the chicks normally quickly learn to stay away from the adults and the adults leave them alone, but occasionally you get a chicken (practically always a hen) that will go out of her way to be a bully and a brute. This is often the lower ranking adult hen in the flock. And some chicks are slower learners about that need to stay away than others.

Another thing. Some chickens see any new chickens as intruders and may try to run them out of their territory. This could be any chicken in the flock. A good way to handle this is to house the chickens side by side for a week or so they can get used to each other’s right to exist. This doesn’t always work but it often helps a lot.

In a flock with no adult rooster but older hens, when a cockerel gets old enough to try to be sexually active, the older hens may be fairly brutal to him. Some adult hens will squat for practically anything in spurs, but many expect a rooster to act like a responsible leading citizen in the community before they grant him any favors. He should dance for them, find them food, be on guard for predators, and keep peace and order in his flock. He also needs to WOW! them with his dignity and personality. An immature cockerel isn’t likely to be able to do that so the older hens resist his attempts, sometimes fairly violently. That’s what people are talking about when they say the older hens teach him his manners.

Also, the sex act is not just about sex, it is also a dominance act. The one on the bottom is accepting the dominance of the one on top, either willingly or by force. Often the more mature of the hens put up a lot of resistance to giving up their dominance to the brash young immature adolescent. I have not been in that situation often where I don’t have a dominant rooster in the flock, but when I did, some hens were submitting to the young cockerel by 5 months of age, but others resisted until he matured more at 11 months.

If you have enough room they normally work through this. It can get pretty rough while they are making this transition though. The more room you have the less likely you are to have injuries but there will be fights and that cockerel will almost certainly force his way on some hens to establish his dominance over them. If that is going to bother you, you need to get rid of him as soon as you are sure he is a he.

 

[hockeygirl56]

Well, he is definitely a he...got a full on crow out of him this morning.

Right now, he and the other 2 pullets are in a brooding box, but that will be changing this weekend. They get to hang out with the older girls when we do free range time when I'm home, which is most every night. This weekend, I'll be fencing off part of the coop for the younger ones to live in for a couple weeks so they can see each other all day, before I let them be in the coop completely. Then they'll have access to the whole coop and the run when I'm not home to let them free range. I always hate integrating the new chickens into the coop because of the arguments that break out, but I take it as slow as I can to help with it.

I think I'm going to try to keep him and see how it goes. If the older girls get too upset over it, or he gets to be mean (and we're doing even more hands on time now to try to avoid that), then we'll be finding him a new home. I don't really want to rehome him until he's a little older anyway because he wouldn't have a buddy to go with, and I feel like he's too young to be without a buddy yet.

One thought I'm having is that maybe having a rooster will help with my pecking problem. I know there can be some feather loss from the whole mounting process, but I've had issues for a while with my hens picking on each other. I have plenty of room, they have access to the run all day, and I try to do free range time every day, plus I try to give them something to entertain them every day including treats to dig for in the mornings. Maybe having a rooster will create a more "healthy" flock atmosphere? I actually have a hen that has started mounting a couple of the other hens over the past few months for some reason, so I think she may be the one that has issues with a real man moving in, but we'll see what happens.

Also, even though I'm sure it's just me that will feel this way and not my girls, I feel weird about the fact that my "old ladies" have never experienced a man before and like they're going to be so confused and flustered about what's happening. It's almost like knowing my daughters are going to lose their virginity...I know, I'm weird