Sexing Chicks After a Few Weeks
Advice from the creater of the
Henderson's
Handy Dandy
Chicken Chart
Sexing Chicks After a Few WeeksAdvice from the creater of the
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Sexing young chicks is a difficult task. Using an ancient Japanese and Chinese art that was refined and placed on a scientific foundation by poultry professors Kiyoshi Masui and Juro Hashimoto around 1930, a professional chick sexer can examine the vent of a recently hatched chick in less than three seconds and determine its sex with greater than 98% accuracy (I've seen some sources claim the rate is 99.8% and others lower it to 90-95%.). The best professionals can accurately examine thousands of chicks in a single day. You can read a book (online, for free, thanks to Cornell's Core Historical Literature of Agriculture [CHLA]) written by Charles Shelby Gibbs in 1935 about the technique, but it is delicate work, and unless you know what you are doing, you can harm or needlessly worry a chick. For the rest of us, instead, the best advice may be to wait. There may be clues within the first week, but there is absolutely no certainty then. After a month, you may have some more confidence, but it might be false confidence. It may take until they are seven weeks before you can be more certain -- or fourteen weeks, or even five months old. Eventually, however, the secondary sex characteristics, behavior, and, especially, crowing will tell you if you have a cockerel. For those of you who can't wait, here is a chart that can help you guess more confidently. It is absolutely, positively guaranteed not to be 100 percent accurate. Please don't use this chart to compare chicks of different breeds, since they will not develop the same way or at the same rate. I have purposefully omitted reference to days or weeks when to expect to be able to observe difference since they will vary so widely by both breed and individual. Clues for Sexing Chicks After a Few Weeks,
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Trait or Characteristic |
Cockerel |
Pullet |
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Heavy Breeds |
Mediterranean & Other Light Breeds |
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Comb & Wattles |
Comb early to turn pink. Later comb and wattles noticably larger & redder |
Comb early to turn pink. Later comb and wattles noticably larger & redder |
Comb and wattles usually remains yellow much longer |
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F |
EARLY |
Still mostly fluffy & downy |
Fairly quick feather development |
Quick
feather development
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LATER SIGNS |
Development slow and in patches. Some bareness at shoulders, back & wing bows |
Development only slightly slower than pullets |
Even
development on back, chest, & thighs. Reaches complete feathering
sooner
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FINAL CLUES |
Development of long, pointed & shiny hackle and saddle feathers |
Development of long, pointed & shiny hackle and saddle feathers |
Feathers
in hackle and saddle areas are oval & rounded
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Tail |
Stumpy, curved; slow to develop |
Curved, but only slightly shorter and slower to develop than pullets |
Long,
straight; quick to develop
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Legs |
Long, sturdy; spurs developing |
Long, sturdy; spurs developing |
Short, delicate
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Head |
Larger & more angular |
Larger & more angular |
Small
& round
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Size |
May be larger (perhaps shorter in length but stouter, more thickset) or becomes noticably larger |
Becomes noticably larger eventually |
Small,
although may be longer
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Posture |
Upright & erect |
Upright & erect |
Lower
set
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Behavior |
May be more alert, aggressive, & noisy; will emit pre-crowing chirps before crowing |
May be more alert, aggressive, & noisy; will emit pre-crowing chirps before crowing |
May be more docile, but can also be
aggressive
& noisy
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I don't have information or experience with bantams or game birds, so you are on your own for them.
DORSAL STRIPES AND EYELINES
Chicks with dorsal stripes can be sexed, often with nearly 100% accuracy. The downy coat is similar to that of red junglefowl chicks, so the pattern is sometimes called "wild striping" or "wildtype." There are several things to look for to determine the chick's sex. A pullet will have refined,well defined markings while the cockeral's coloring will be more fuzzy and blurry. You can start with the dorsal stripes (stripes along the back). A male's stripes will be lighter, less well defined, and fade out before reaching the head. A female's dorsal stripes will be darker, often defined with a outline, and will extend much further onto the head. Check the head for two clues. If the chick has a long, dark eyeline extending towards the ear, the chick is almost certainly a female. A male may have an eyeline, but it will be short, light and blurry. In addition, look at a triangle on the top of the head. The triangle on a female will be dark, have a sharp contrast, and may be outlined by an almost black outline. A male's triangle will be lighter and a bit indistinct.
I have great confidence in writing that in the picture above,
the brown Welsumer chick with the well defined
triangle
on the top of her head is a female. I will let you decide about the
chick on the far
right with dorsal stripes. Are they dark and
well defined stripes or lighter,
less distinct stripes?
One breed for which I have used the wild striping pattern for
sexing is the Welsumer. The one variety for which I've successfully
sexed chicks through this pattern is the Brown Leghorn. I've observed
it in Ameraucanas, but not confidently.
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Acknowledgments: The chart includes some information gained from personal observation but was also adapted in part from information found on three different sources: a chart on Greg Davies's The Chook Shed and two sites that no longer exist: one by a vet at UC Davis and another from Eleanor (aka Henwife). This page authored and maintained by John R. Henderson
(jhenderson@icyousee.org) |