Integrating young flock, when to separate cockerels

clickdb

Chirping
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I have two sets of 5 chicks that i am going to try and integrate this weekend. The older bunch are 7 (2 of them) to 8 (3 of them) weeks old, and 4/5 are cockerels (maybe all five, but thats another thread...). My younger group is 4 to 5 weeks old and have outgrown their brooder box. The older group lives in the main run/coop, and for the last 2 weeks i have been bringing the younger chicks out and placing them in a side run that shares a "wall" with the main run. They are out there for 1-3 hours a day during the week, and all day on the weekends.
Tonight they will be having some supervised time with the big chicks in the main run, and tomorrow they will be out there all day (if everything goes well tonight).

First question; Should they be OK together since they have seen each other frequently over the last 2 weeks? They stick there heads through the shared fence and talk/peck at each other, but there doesn't seem to be any problems between them.

Second question; As mentioned above, I ended up with A LOT of cockerels from the straightrun bins, and we will only ultimately keep one. out of the 10 chicks, 6 or 7 will have to be rehomed/sent to freezer camp (if i can convince my wife to eat them lol). At what point should i separate out the extra cockerels? I don't want fights over the pullets, and if i let them go at it for too long i know the pecking order will just be re-shuffled when i remove them. We already know which rooster we will be keeping long term so it makes sense (to me) that we let him have the top spot without too much competition, but we don't want to get rid of the rest before we have to.

Thank you BYC, I have much to learn!
 
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The integration went fairly smoothly. There was lots of one-off head pecking and chasing over the weekend, but now they have started getting to the point where they don't go nuts when in proximity of each other. Yesterday and today I had a great unifying moment, giving everyone meal worms. They were all more interested in getting a few worms than picking on each other. Games of keep away started and then they would come back for more.
The little ones still won't follow the bigger chicks into the coop at night, and they make two separate piles on the floor for now, but I noticed the piles have gotten closer to each other every night.
Thanks BYC for all the great info available on this site, it takes some (but not all, lol) of the guesswork out of learning about my flock.
 
Tonight, all the chickens took themselves to the coop at dark! It took 6 nights of putting the younger group in before they figured it out tonight, I think that had as much to do with the older chicks being in there as anything else.
Huzzah!
 

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