One of the of the most common questions asked in on-line chicken forums is – is this little
chicken developing into a hen or a rooster?
In this video I’d like to give you some ideas about how you can answer that question.
If you want to know even before the egg has hatched, well that’s actually possible – check
out my latest video about that. That will work, but only if you have a huge
lab at your disposal.
You can get a DNA test on your chick – there are DNA testing labs that can do that for
you. You just fill out a form, take a sample of blood, feathers or eggshell that the chick
just hatched from, send it to the lab with the fee and in a few days you should have
an answer. That will work, but only if you are prepared
to spend quite a few dollars per chick for the test.
Then there’s the way the experts do it. First you need to know that the rooster’s
sex organs are not on the outside like most mammals. They are located inside the cloaca,
also known as the “vent”. So you need to be able to look inside the vent to see
it. Second, you can only do this when the chick
is only a day or two old, because once the chick starts to eat, its lower abdomen becomes
distended with food and changes the way things look.
Third, you have to do this on a live chick, so you have to pick it up, turn it upside
down, open the vent wide then squeeze the chick a little to make the vent turn a bit
inside out, but not so hard that you damage the fragile baby chick.
Then, remember that this is the chick’s vent – that’s where the poop comes out,
so often what you’re going to see is poop. So you gotta get that out of the way. And
you have to be quick before another glob of poop comes along, or you’ll have to clear
that away too. And then the really tricky bit – you have
to recognize what you see, and amongst all the different shapes and sizes it’s not
easy to identify what you’re looking at. I’ll put a link in the description below
for anyone who wants to know a bit more. So vent sexing works, but only if you’re
an expert.
So where does that leave the average person who keeps a few chickens? Well we have some
options.
Feather sexing is a well-known method, although many people don’t quite understand it. There
are a couple of different approaches and either can be reliable, but it depends on the breed,
the strain, or the cross.
Different breeds of chicken develop their feathers at different rates. In general the
heavy breeds, like Wyandottes, Rhode Island Reds and Barnevelders are slow feathering,
while the light breeds, like the Leghorns and Anconas are fast feathering. In a fast
feathering light breed, the wing tips of the wing feathers might even be apparent as soon
as the newly hatched chick dries off after hatching – these wee leghorns are just 1
day old and already you can see feathers appearing at the end of their wings
And here they are at 2 days old – look at those wings!
And by the time a fast-feathered chick is 3 weeks old, it will be mostly covered in
real feathers. On the other hand a slow feathering chick
might not get a complete covering of body feathers until it is about 6 weeks old.
As well as the overall rate of feather development, there is a clue when the chick is between
1 and 3 days old. Chickens have two rows of feathers on their wings – the lower layer
are the primaries which will develop into the long primaries – the feathers that we
usually think of as the wing feathers. Above them are a layer of coverts, which in the
adult chicken are not as long as the primaries or secondaries.
When the baby chick is just developing its feathers, between 1 and 3 days old, a fast-feathering
chick will have primaries and coverts that are different lengths, while a slow-feathering
chick’s primaries and coverts will be equal in length.
So with a bit of experience, you can tell the difference between fast-fathering chicks
and slow-feathering chicks, and if you cross a slow-feathering hen with a fast-feathering
rooster, then all the female chicks will be fast-feathering and the male chicks will be
slow feathering. So, that will work, you’ll be able to tell
the boys from the girls, but only if you plan the cross of the fast and slow feathering
breed correctly, and only until the chicks are about three days old, and it only works
for that one generation.
There’s also a subtle difference in the rate of feather development between the girls
and the boys of purebred slow-feathering chicks – boys develop their feathers even more
slowly than the girls. That’s because the gene for slow feathering is dominant and is
carried on the Z chromosome – I have a series of videos about chicken genetics – if you’re
interested maybe I could do one about the slow feathering gene. So it means that at
around 5 weeks of age, slow feathering chicks will have wing feathers but the boy’s back
and shoulders will still only have chick down, while the girl is filling in with feathers.
These chicks are Barnevelders which are a heavy breed and slow feathering. At 5 weeks
old the girl is pretty well feathered all over. But the boy still has quite sparse feathering
on his back, and no feathers at all on his shoulders, just down.
So with a bit of experience, that will work, you’ll be able to tell the boys from the
girls by their feathering rate and pattern, but only if they are heavy breed chicks.
How about something a little easier to recognize – what about colour coding the chicks?
Well, maybe not quite pink for girls and blue for boys, but quite a few breeds come in a
colour called “duckwing”. As soon as you the chick develops breast feathers you will
know – if the feathers are brown it’s a girl, if the breast feathers are black,
it’s a boy.
But if you want to tell even earlier, as soon as the chicks hatch, you can cross a Rhode
Island Red rooster with a Light Sussex hen, and all the girl chicks will be brown and
all the boy chicks will be yellow. This is called a sex link cross, and I explain how
that works in this video. And yes, That will work, but .. again, only if you plan the cross
of the rooster and the hen correctly, and again it only works for that one generation.
But, what if we want colour coded chicks that are not a cross, but a pure breed? Are there
pure breeds of chicken that have colour coded chicks, generation after generation? Yes,
there are – they are called Autosexing breeds.
The most well-known is probably the cream legbar. With cream legbar chicks, the girls
are patterned over their heads and bodies in a brown and cream pattern often called
“chipmunk”, and they have a dark eyeliner line beside their eyes. On the boys the pattern
is fuzzier and paler. Although the legbars are the most well-known,
this same pattern difference can be seen in chicks of any heritage breed whose adult plumage
is the so-called wild-type or gold duckwing pattern, like brown leghorns. This is a brown
leghorn chick – you can see the chipmunk pattern and eyeliner very clearly.
And the breeds that have barred plumage also show differences in chick down colouring – the
white spot on the top of a girl’s head is smaller and well-defined, while on the boy’s
head is a bigger, blurrier white smear that often runs down into his neck.
I have also had some success in picking Rhode Island Red chicks – the girl chicks of some
lines seem to have some dark splotches while the boys are an even paler buff colour.
These chicks are now a month old but the dark splotches in the chick down are still visible.
So looking at chick down colour and pattern will work, but only for some breeds, and only
if that line has been maintained to clearly show the difference in chick down.
Some people say they can tell the difference between the thicker, robust legs of males
compared to the more slender legs of the girls, but I’ve never had much luck with that.
The palest chick here looks like it has quite slender legs,
but because it’s the only pale chick in the hatch I know which one it is,
and three months later he looked like this. Even these two Anconas at 3 and a half weeks
old, I couldn’t tell just by looking at leg development, although by now I can easily
tell that the chick on the left is female and the one on the right is male – and when
they put their heads up, you can tell too, by the size and colour of their combs.
With the light Mediterranean breeds like the leghorns and Anconas that have a big single
comb, I think comb development is the easiest way to tell the little girls from the boys.
This group is all girls except this one boy, and even at 3 ½ weeks old, you can see that his comb is bigger and pinker.
Two weeks later, at 5 ½ weeks old, it’s easy to spot the boy.
And don't forget to look at the wattles.
Sometimes the wattles are even more obvious than the combs.
and by the time they are 8 weeks old, it’s really obvious – his comb is much bigger
and pinker than the girls’.
It’s a little harder with a breed like a Wyandotte that has a rose comb instead of
the big single comb. But these two Wyandotte chicks are only 4 weeks old, and you can tell
that the boy’s comb is definitely a redder pink, even though it’s not very large
Some breeds have even less comb than the Wyandotte – look at these Araucana chicks at 3½ weeks
old. Unlike the Ancona chicks at that age, there’s not a hope to telling a boy’s
comb from a girl’s. In fact it’s not until they are about 2 months old, like here, that
we really start to see the difference – the boy’s comb is slightly redder than the girls’.
So you can see that in order to tell whether that chick is a girl or a boy, you need to
know what to look for, but you also need to know how old that chick is and what breed
it is so you know what you’re looking at. And if course it’s easiest if you have a
group of chicks all the same breed and age, which includes boys and girls.
If there is more than one boy in the group, I often find that one is more advanced than
the other. The chick on the right here is a boy but he was always less advanced than
his brother. His comb was paler and his wattles paler. And it was the more advanced boy who
learnt to crow first.
Eventually of course, it becomes obvious. If you just keeping watching them as they
grow, now you know what to look for, you’ll get better at guessing. And eventually they
will make it quite obvious.
So there’s some things that you can look out for when you’re wondering whether that
chick is growing into a hen or a rooster. I hope you found it useful. Thanks for watching. See you next time.