11 week Easter Egger (resembling an Ameraucana)

[jca]

Hello. I got this one as a chick commercially (we have named it Neckpecker) and they assured me it was a hen but from what I understand they are only like 95% accurate with that and easter eggers are the hardest to tell. A lot of the feathers are very round but there is an ever so slight curve to the tail. And while Neckpecker gets along fine with the other hens, she seems a lot more alert when it comes to hawks. Plus she's noticeably bigger than the other hens of the same age (a Barred Rock and a Silver Laced Wyndotte), but I've heard that's common in easter eggers. Then yesterday she flew up to snatch some dark clothing off the clothesline, which I've never seen a chicken do before. Seemed kind of aggressive if she thought it was a bird of prey but she's also ravenously hungry so if she just thought it was food, it probably means nothing.

So, what do you think? Hen or rooster?

 

[StripeyThing_1]

Pullet, for sure

 

[StripeyThing_1]

Do you have any roosters?
If you don’t she could just be at the top of the pecking order. Hens can definitely act like roosters sometimes .

Neckpecker is really cute and looks very healthy!

 

[jca]

Do you have any roosters?
If you don’t she could just be at the top of the pecking order. Hens can definitely act like roosters sometimes .

Neckpecker is really cute and looks very healthy!

We have one more hen who is 90 days older (Chip) who is already laying. She has exhibited rooster-like behavior when a cat came around. It was adorable.

Chip, we actually hatched ourselves. We got two chickens last year but a racoon got them in the fall. The kids were in such mourning that we asked a friend of ours who has a chicken farm to give us some eggs. She gave us 6 and an incubator. Three hatched. Two were roosters and she took those back - we held on to the calmer of the two as long as we could to keep Chip company (the city doesn't allow roosters so if any neighbor complained of the crowing, which was quite frequent, we might have lost our license to have chickens at all).

We got these three new babies (Neckpecker, Hoover, and Fluff) the instant they became available - we knew Fleef (the final rooster) wasn't going to be tolerated long with the neighbors and we wanted Chip to have as little time alone as possible. She did have to go two weeks alone anyway, though, due to it being too cold to bring the babies out (they were 6 weeks old when we moved Fleef). I wanted to do a video of integrating them (we started with letting the babies out for a couple hours a day - it was still too cold for them to sleep outside), but I missed the crucial moment when we finally let them share a coop so it seems like all the other footage is wasted. It was really cute, though. For a couple of weeks Chip pecked at them through the cage they were in but after a while we let them out in the yard together. Chip wasn't too aggressive but we were still uneasy about stuffing all the babies in her coop. Finally, we just put both coops in the same run and let them sort out where they'd sleep. Chip climbed into theirs and stood in the corner facing the wall like she didn't want to intrude but wanted to be part of the flock. And like an idiot I didn't get it on camera.

Anyway, of the three I don't know where neckpecker is in the pecking order. I'm pretty sure Fluff (the Barred Rock) is at the bottom - she actually prefers being picked up and petted over foraging. I'm a tiny bit concerned about that, in fact. Hoover has taken a few jabs at Chip, though, but I've seen almost no interaction between Hoover and Neckpecker. So I don't really know which is the dominant one between them.