Sexing 3 week old chicks

[peafowl_Lover]

Hi all I have 13, 3 week old chicks can ye help me sex them please?

 

[NatJ]

I would give them all a bit longer to be certain, before making any permanent decisions. My guesses at present:

I think the blue chick in post #2 is a male.

The black chick in post #3 is a male (I am most sure about him.) He's got either a pea or rose comb, not single like some of the others.

Of the white chicks, I think the first one in post #3 is probably a male.

The buff chick in post #2 (first photo in that post) looks like a maybe-male to me, but that might just be the angle of the photo.

The other chicks might be females, or they might be males who are developing more slowly. I would definitely keep watching all of them.

 

[NatJ]

That's a lot of roos! My chickens are my pets so what should I do with the roos. I would like them to have a happy home.

You can make a big pen and let all the males live together, apart from the females. That keeps them from pestering the females. Sometimes the males will all get along well enough, and sometimes they fight enough to cause injury and need to be separated. If they grow up together, and you have that many of them, I think it increases the chances of them getting along fairly well.

If you cannot keep males, then of course you will have to do something else. Or if you do not want to keep them all.

You can try to sell them or give them away. That sometimes works, and sometimes does not work. If you want to be very picky about what homes they go to, it is much harder. It is easier to find people who want a chicken to butcher & eat, than to find people who want a pet rooster or a rooster for breeding.

It sounds like you would probably not want to butcher them & eat them.( Some people like that method of dealing with excess roosters, and some people do not.)

 

[peafowl_Lover]

Thanks if they don't sell I'll give them away or make a rooster flock and I'll keep a few anyway. What should the ratio of hens to roos be?

 

[NatJ]

What should the ratio of hens to roos be?

Many people recommend one rooster for 10 hens. That is about right for a big commercial breeding flock, where they want the fewest possible roosters while still having all the eggs be fertile (which is where that ratio originated.)

In small backyard flocks, with one or a few roosters, the temperament of the individual rooster makes an enormous difference. Some roosters can have 20 hens and still overmate their favorites (so those poor hens have bald backs and heads, and can get injured.) Some other roosters do fine with just one or two hens, without any signs of overmating.

Hens can do just fine with no roosters at all, unless you want fertile eggs for hatching.

For a basic starting point, maybe try 1 rooster for any number of hens between 5 and 15, with more than one rooster if you have more hens than that. No matter what numbers you start with, be prepared to adjust one way or the other as you see how your specific birds do.

 

[NatJ]

Yes I have 9 hens so I'll probably have 1 rooster to all the hens.

That sounds good.

When can I give the chicks treats?

If you want the fun of giving them treats, you can get a little bit of their chick starter wet and offer it to them. They start out scared of the new thing, then they try it and wipe their beaks and think about it, but after that they usually love it.

Wet chick starter as a treat can be started at any age, because it has all the nutrients the chicks need (just like dry chick starter does.)

For other treats, you probably could start tiny amounts whenever you like, but make sure the chicks have grit available (so their gizzards can grind up whatever they eat). Chicks can be oddly picky, ignoring some things and loving others, and what they like can be very different than what other chicks like. (For example, I have read "my chicks love mealworms" and "my chicks hate mealworms" about chicks of the same age.)

Do not give large amounts of treats to chicks, because you want them to keep eating enough chick starter to stay healthy and grow properly.

Personally, I like to chop grass into tiny short bits as a treat for chicks. The short bits are so it cannot make a tangle in their crop. If they like it, they can eat it. If they do not like it, they can scratch it into the bedding and it soon dries out into tiny bits of hay. Either way, it is not rotting and making a wet stinky mess, the way some other foods might. This is my second-favorite treat for chicks (with wet chick starter being my favorite treat for chickens of all ages.) Other people have different favorite treats, and pretty much all of them are good in one situation or another.

 

[BrahmasMama02]

What was the outcome of these chicks? Were the guesses accurate?

 

[peafowl_Lover]

 

[peafowl_Lover]

 

[peafowl_Lover]

5 of them are auto sexing so I didn't post pics of them.