please help! introducing fiesty leghorn hen bought at fair...

[btpeters]

hello!
i am a newbie to this site, but sooo thankful for all i have learned so far.

we have 6 hens--pullets--that get along great. tonight we purchased a few more at the fair. we ended up with 2 docile white cochin hens and one fiesty leghorn hen. we put them altogether in the coop after the 6 were asleep, but the leghorn is in a cat carrier b/c we aren't sure how she'll be in the morning. so....any advice on how to go about making sure the other girls don't get pecked on in the morning?

also, do you think we can just let them all roam around the yard with the others all day and assume they will come back?? we live on 3 acres and somehow the first batch always knew where our property was and would always come back.

one more question that i'm really curious about. ... we have no rooster at this point. is it possible that these hens from the fair, who came from a farm with many roosters, are prego?

? i apologize if this is an incredibly stupid question, but i would assume that is possible, and that if we left the eggs for them to sit on, we could get little chicks at some point??? is there any way to know if the eggs have been fertilized or not? how long after a hen has been with a rooster could her eggs still possibly be fertilized? hope this makes sense. i'm kind of excited at the possibility of having some eggs hatch!

thanks for any help you have time to give!! brittany

 

[Southern28Chick]

You should quarantine the new chickens until you know for a fact that they are healthy and disease free. There was a topic on here somewhere about quarantining new birds but I can't find it now. Those new birds could have mites or lice or a disease you don't even notice now. Get the new birds away from the others ASAP.

If someone can find the topic Speckledhen posted about new birds please post it here. Thanks.

 

[rooster-red]

Its the first sticky in emergencies diseases & cures.
I don't know how to link it, so I will copy and paste.:
I've seen so many people who have bought new birds and because they seem healthy, immediately throw them in with their flock or put them in a pen where there can be some contact. You MUST quarantine newly purchased birds unless you have bought chicks from a hatchery. Disease can take up to a month to show up in a seemingly healthy chicken. Many, many of these common diseases make a chicken a carrier for life and if your flock gets it, they become carriers for life. Some are even reportable to the state and the birds must be destroyed in some cases.
Some sellers are not aware their birds are ill and some are just plain unscrupulous and don't care. I have only purchased ONE grown bird and he was in quarantine for over a month, while I consulted experts about various things. At the very least, he did have favus, a fungal infection on his comb and face and lice. I treated both and he had neither by the time he joined my flock, but it was very stressful and I'll probably never buy adult birds again. This can cause such pain and devastation, that I really wanted to reiterate this point to all my BYC family.


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Cynthia
N. Ga. Mtns.
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