Help with Poults

[joshm97]

Well I had a bit of a wierd year with the Birds, I picked up a Goose and some Ducks last summer along with more chickens and its been a bit rough. Well the hatch was going wonderful this year, we had lots of egg production and we were thrilled. then we put our eggs in the incubator, and let the hens also sit on eggs, we also sent some eggs to a friend so he could hatch also. out of the 20 eggs between me my friend and the hen we only got four friggin poults! and two of them had birth defects... there was no interbreeding between offspring and parents becasue we only have our original birds. we split the birds with my friend and one of ours was a little disfigured... missing an eye and the jaw bone overgrown we faced a moral decision of whether to put it down or not. saddly the poult actually died before we could act. now we are stuck with the one poult and he constantly lost calls, the bird is eating drinking and very active but I almost feel bad for the poor thing. is there a way I could just throw in some new poults alittle older then em?

 

[TattooedMama]

I would say it depends on how much older they are. I drove 3 hours to get some Narragansett poults from a breeder. He only had 3 younger poults for sale but was willing to give me two of his older birds. They were hatched on 5/10 and 5/27, so there was roughly a two week difference and a big size difference. I did take the smallest two of his 5/10 birds hoping for hens. We put them together and watched closely to make sure the little ones would be ok. The birds did great and are all still together. They all cuddle and never bicker. I think this worked partially because the larger birds were put into a new environment with the smaller ones. I wouldn't put your little one in a pen with big ones, or too many at that. Move one or two bigger poults into the pen the younger poult is in and watch closely for the first few hours.

 

[retlaw]

I have 6 week old with 5 day old.
The little ones get a little scared when the big ones try flying around but other then that i see no problems.

I put the 6 little ones in the big ones coop.
There are around 15 big ones.