I have a roo and 2 hens in my coop now (all bantams), one hen hasnt layed yet, one has been laying for maybe 2 months. the roo is the same age as the hen that is laying- just to give you an idea of thier ages. About a month ago I got 2 pullets (standards) and 3 guinea keets. I believe the pullets were at least a month old when I got them, so by now they are good size and fully feathered. Two of my keets are big too, but one was much younger so it is still a little small. I have been keeping the pullets and keets together in hopes the guineas will attach to my chickens and stay around/roost at night. The hutch they are kept in is getting crowded now, and Im thinking its about time to introduce them to the 3 adult chickens I have. Only thing I cant decide is to just introduce the pullets to them and keep the keets seperate until the small one gets big, or take my chances and introduce them all together so the guineas stay attached to the chickens. Any advice?
If it's getting crowded, take the bigger ones out first... but I usually wait until they are at least 16 weeks old to integrate with older ones.
They're pretty young, but so are your other chickens(right?). We had some injured birds we had to pull out of our big flock this summer and they were much younger than our "house" chickens. We just placed them in the chicken run and kept the coop door to the run closed. After about 3-5 days we opened up the run and the coop door (our house chickens also free-range). They were very soon in the coop itself with no problems. This delegated space gave all the chickens time to "check" each other out for a few days.
