Wyandottes and Easter Eggers

[CluckinClegg]

I just got some 2 EE and 2 Wyandotte chicks hoping to add to my miniature flock of 2 hens I currently have. My 2 gals are low drama and pretty quiet. I am hoping my chicks will be the same. However, I realized after I brought the Wyandottes home and started reading about my breeds again (I did research before buying) I realized I meant to get Australorps, not Wyandottes! I made this mistake because we had to buy our chicks within 5 minutes because they sell out super fast! Anyway, my question is: Will my Wyandotte’s be troublesome and bully my EEs? Should I rehome them? I wanted to get breeds that are low drama and accept confinement well and are not too noisy. My older hens are a BO and a RIR.

 

[~KH~]

I just got some 2 EE and 2 Wyandotte chicks hoping to add to my miniature flock of 2 hens I currently have. My 2 gals are low drama and pretty quiet. I am hoping my chicks will be the same. However, I realized after I brought the Wyandottes home and started reading about my breeds again (I did research before buying) I realized I meant to get Australorps, not Wyandottes! I made this mistake because we had to buy our chicks within 5 minutes because they sell out super fast! Anyway, my question is: Will my Wyandotte’s be troublesome and bully my EEs? Should I rehome them? I wanted to get breeds that are low drama and accept confinement well and are not too noisy. My older hens are a BO and a RIR.

I think it will depend more on the individual hens - I've only had one adult Wyandotte and she was definitely not a bully. She was more on the timid end of the scale. My Australorps were higher in the pecking order.

 

[Mrs. K]

A bigger influence than breed is the size of your set up. You have tripled the size of the flock. How big is your coop/run?

A coop for 6 hens should be at least, or bigger than 24 square feet. So 6 feet by 4 feet. I maybe making a big assumption, but a lot of chicken coops are sold for 6 birds and are not anywhere near big enough.

Too small of coup will cause more problems than the breed. You might have trouble with the RIR - they tend to be a bit aggressive to new birds.

MrsK

 

[rosemarythyme]

While there are some generalizations with every breed, each bird is still an individual. Very hard to say if your birds will fit the "standard," or if they'll be the exact opposite, or somewhere in between.

Unless you're dead set on the Australorps, I'd say keep them and enjoy them and if they do end up being problematic in the future, you should be able to rehome them fairly easily as there's usually good demand for started or point of lay pullets.

 

[Ridgerunner]

In my opinion your current Rhode Island Red should help show how important breed is in this. RIR's are more maligned as brutes to humans and especially to other chickens than any other breed on this forum. I don't know what will happen when you try to integrate those chicks but personally I'd worry about the BO as much as the RIR. Either one or both could be a problem.

EE's are not a breed. We often disagree on what an EE actually is. There are no breed standards and no breed tendencies to go by. I do believe breeds do have tendencies. BO's tend to go broody more often than RIR's. But you have to have enough of each breed for averages to mean something. You don't. With just two you could have one on either end of the extremes or both on the same end.

I certainly agree how much room you have and how it is laid out are extremely important in housing chickens once they are integrated. When you integrate you will need even more room. And when you have a maturity difference you need even more room when integrating. How much room you have inside, how much room outside, how they are laid out, and how you manage that room are tremendously more important than breed.

 

[Ch1ck1eMama]

For whatever it’s worth, I’m a newb but I have 2 Wyandotte and 3 EE that are all 5-6 weeks. They are outside now and all get along pretty well. There is of course the immature rooster posturing but all in all everyone gets along. The Wyandotte pullet is demure and low key. The Wyandotte cockerel is pretty calm compared to the 2 EE cockerels.