Within a flock, there will be an alpha male. His choice of mate becomes the alpha female. Then there's the Beta couple. Others will couple, &/or serve as guards. Not sure what the magic of 10 is, but I spent a lot of time just sitting quietly watching my 1st 7, from keets to adulthood (hello, covid). The 1st mating season, the Alpha hen made a nest, he sat next to the nest, and the other 5 sat in a circle around the nest. The hen stayed on her nest, the others would come and go. When she started calling "come back come back", they all went running to her.
Then I watched the beta hen wander away on her own, and she made her own nest. Right about the time the other 5 had come back up to me to eat, alpha started hollering and they turned to scurry back to her. But before they got very far, beta hen called out from the opposite side of the property. As I watched, the 5 froze, and I swear there was an agreement made as they stared at each other. Alpha male and one other headed in one direction, beta and the other headed the other direction.
They were pretty tolerant of me, so I could walk up close enough to see the mate sitting next to the nest, the hen on the nest, and the "guard" sitting about 5 feet away.
The 2 guards were inseparable otherwise. She randomly dropped eggs whereever they were,but never attempted to make a nest that I knew of. Possibly that's what she was doing the day she flew into a passing suv.
My beta male was the one to perch atop the coop in the evening and call out until everyone was inside, and he'd chase down one of the hens that took too long meandering in. He never went in until everyone else was in.
When I was down to one hen & she went broody, the 2 males I had left had nothing to do but stare at her or fight w/each other.
I introduced them to the keets I had incubated. They'd watch them through the patio door every day until I took the keets outside. From that point on, the two males took over parenting those keets, together, cooperatively. It was pretty amazing to watch.
Once hers hatched, SHE wanted nothing to do with the incubated ones, but the males cont to "parent" them as well as the newly hatched ones.
Once I lost my males, the hen was a nervous nellie for a long time & didn't even want to come out of the coop. I realized then that the males always kept an eye cocked to the sky, watching, while the females grazed obliviously. So now she had to be the one to watch and protect the remaining keets.
So *in my opinion* the flock dynamics are about everyone having a role to play in the security of the flock, & the bigger the flock, the more security.
It's like getting in between two dogs in a fight when you get between them. I got to where I'd just pick up the bird that was closest to me. The tom never won. But because they don't fight the same way neither of them could tell who was the winner. Thankfully the Bourbon Reds had the decency to leave the geese alone. The Blue Slate was just hard-headed. But the guineas were angels with the turkeys and geese. The geese hate everyone and they didn't even mind the guineas.
