Too cool!! There's a new Sheriff in town!
This is nearly exactly my experience - I have 16 birds, 3 of whom are cockerels, and around 10 weeks of age I started to let them out in the midafternoon. For the first few days they didn't go further than about 20 feet from their run, and always put themselves back in by the hour before dusk. After a week or so I started letting them out in the mornings, so they had more time, and they got braver about immediately running out to their favorite tree, and later a favorite bush. Every 2 days or so they got ten feet braver. By 14 weeks they were out from when I woke until when they put themselves in (and I go to count beaks at dusk). I live bordering 100 acres of deep woods nature preserve so I am risking predation but the roosters are already very attentive sentries, it's fun watching them work in a team when they decide it's time for the hens to come up from their noon napping place behind the rock wall, to hang under the ornamental trees a bit, and later back into the run. Their overnight setup is seriously tight like fort knox, and by spring we plan to have a livestock guardian dog to lounge around with them outside in the daytime. Sometimes in the afternoon I'll go out with a bowl of some compost maybe cobs after corn on the cob or the ends of my kids' cereal bowls, and I'll go to the edge of the woods and yell CHICKCHICKCHOOKCHOOKCHICKENS and slowly, they appear. They drift into view like gorillas out of the mist, and then they come run to eat from my hand. Half are cuddly, but the leghorns are just too flighty for much of that.
