Looks like my easter eggers (sold as "Ameraucanas" by TSC, but you can't get real Ameraucanas from feed stores and hatcheries). You can't vent sex them at this age - that only works for like the first day, and you have to be a real expert. Looks like a pullet so far, but it's really too young...
How big are they? I have several cornish rocks (meat birds) that look very much like that, so if they're BIG (like a couple pounds), then you might have had the bad luck to get meat birds by accident.
My chicks have all been doing fine so far, but one of my cornish rocks has suddenly become sick. I noticed yesterday that he stayed apart from the rest of the flock, didn't eat or move around when they went outside, and didn't seem to care when the rest of them moved pretty far away from him...
Our breakdown:
Chicks: $25
Chick-raising supplies: $35ish (lamp, feeders, food, etc)
Coop: $180
So, call it $250, give or take. My husband was shocked to find that the chicks themselves were by far the cheapest part of getting set up to have chickens.
Thanks for all the advice, everybody. I think we're probably going to go with a compromise. We'll let them roam the yard most of the time, but we'll also have a small-ish covered run that they can go in when no one can be home.
Well, we're just about done building the coop for my 2-week-old chicks, and now my husband wants to know what I want him to do for a run. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if we really need a run. My backyard is about a quarter acre, and the whole thing is fenced with 6-foot wooden...
The chipmunk-striped one and the little guy in the middle of the last picture look like Easter Eggers to me. Not sure on the rest. It's way too early to guess genders.
I believe the girls usually feather in first, so I'd guess girl if it's got a lot of tail feathers already, but that is totally not 100% so don't get too set on it!
Ahh, that's a relief, thank you. I was afraid that maybe the cornish pen at the store had some kind of horrible disease that they were going to pass on to my other birds or something. You know how your mind always goes to the worst possible scenario... I'll go to the meat bird section right...
My chicks are about a week old now, and I've noticed that some of them have red raw skin on their bellies where some of the fuzz is rubbed off. This has only happened to the cornish rock chicks - the easter eggers and production reds have no such problem. I don't think the problem is any...
I think it's entirely preference. I got day-old chicks mostly because I wanted the fun of raising a bunch of cute fluffy babies. It probably would've been cheaper to get older pullets, though.
Super cute! We've got a chipmunk-y easter egger ourselves, and it's our favorite pattern too! So curious what they're all going to look like when they grow up.
Did you order straight-run or pullets? If you ordered pullets, they'll all be hens. If you ordered straight-run, the black sex-links will be easy to tell. The females will be solid black, but the males will have a white spot on their head. For the barred rocks and easter eggers, you could...