Cull 5 "Extra" Roos before Adding 6 New Hens to Existing Flock of 10 Chicks 11 Weeks Old

[GuppyTJ]

Would it be a good idea to start culling my 7 roosters prior to adding 6 new hens to an existing flock of 10 chickens of 11 weeks of age? Here are the details:

I have 10 straight run chicks that are 11 weeks old. I had very bad luck and ended up with 7 roosters and 3 hens. So, last week I bought 6 hens that are 9 weeks old. I've had the new 6 hens in a fenced in area inside the coop where the original 10 live. I've had them together this way, interacting through the fence for going on a week. The original 10 free range but so far, the new 6 hens stay inside the coop.

At some point, I need to introduce the new and old chicks to each other. My concern is I have so many roosters in the original 10, as I mentioned, probably 7 of the 10 are roosters. I know which rooster I want to keep and I have a backup rooster identified. Which means at about 18 weeks, I intended to butcher for the table, the other 5 roosters.

My question is: Should I butcher the other 5 roosters now, prior to introducing the 6 new hens to the original flock? I'm worried that with so many roosters, they will hurt my new 6 hens. But the 5 roosters are under-weight, not their full table-sized bird yet. I will butcher them if I need to as my future flock is in the 6 new hens, plus the original 3.

Thoughts? What would you do if you were me? I've never done a chicken introduction before.

Thanks,
Guppy

 

[Farmer Viola]

You might consider separating the 5 roosters/dinner-to-be's in their own pen, out of the pecking order, while allowing the new girls to be introduced to the existing 5?

 

[Percheron chick]

At 4 months of age, most roosters are still fine. There is only 2 weeks age difference so you should be able to mix the groups and not miss a beat. There will be some chasing and pecking but they do that everyday anyway. You should be able to get at least one more month out of this arrangement. Is there any place to put the 5 surplus roosters? You could just pull them out, put them in a pen by themselves and let them finish growing.

 

[GuppyTJ]

Farmer Viola and Percheron Chick,

Thank you SO much for the suggestions and insights about the age of the roosters making it probably OK to introduce them. Not sure why I didn't think of penning off the 5 extra roosters, probably lack of experience on my part. I do have an area I could separate out the 5 extra roos. It's the area that the 6 new hens are in right now. If nothing else, I can use the idea of penning the extra 5 roosters as my backup plan if things get too rough. The challenge I need to think about is that my chickens free range so I'd have to pen the 5 extra roosters for the next month or so until they finished growing out, which we (me and them) are not used to. But it would be well worth it, to protect the long term flock.

Thanks to you, I now have a plan for going forward. Love this forum and website, so helpful, thanks to people like you.

Guppy

 

[GuppyTJ]

Well... all good plans certainly have their holes, so to speak!

So, I go out to the coop yesterday afternoon and all 16 chicks (6 new and 10 existing) are in the coop together in the same area. I'd left the new chicks free to run around inside the entire coop (not confined to their penned in area inside the coop). I accidentally left the pop door unlatched and it must have popped open. All 10 of the older chicks had gone in. So... effectively, the chicks were integrated. I watched them and it was just as you said, Percheron Chick, the bigger chicks chase the younger ones and the younger ones scurry out of the way. So far... (crossing my fingers) there has been no blood, no pulled out feathers, just a bit of squawking.

Could have been a big mistake, leaving the pop door unlatched. I'm glad it turned out OK (again, so far, not counting my chicks until...) I'm glad I did it this way too, confining the new chicks in the coop safely behind the fence but with the older ones. I left up the fencing but it's open. So now, the younger chicks run in there to just be separate from the big chicks. The 6 new ones also sleep on the picnic bench seat I put in there, just like they have this whole past week that they've been in there. They have a separate food and waterer in their little area too, so that helps them not compete for resources. Finally, there are many places to hide in the coop when they get caught outside their little fenced in area. For example, I have 2 hardware cloth covered "screen" doors which swing into the coop. I keep these wide open and they each provide yet another area that the little chicks seem to hide behind quite a bit.

So, they're integrated technically speaking, but the younger ones are definitely not mingling with the older ones in any way. I know it takes time (like 2-3 weeks) for them to become one flock and even then, I know sometimes that doesn't happen ever. I imagine they might become one flock once I cull the 5 extra roos in about 2 months. I suppose that could shake up the pecking order enough to have them truly integrate.

Thanks again for the help,
Guppy