2-week old chicks. Female? Male?

If these are eggs from Marks and Spencer, then they are most likely from red sex link layers. Which means that white birds are male.
 
Welcome to the world of chickens, first of all! Your lot looks very nice. I'm not going to touch on the Leghorn, Sex link or the Wyandotte because I don't have any experience with those breeds and cannot make an educated guess on their sex. Now, your RIR looks very pullet like to me. Nice long tail and a tiny comb. (In our experience, out of our lots of chicks that wound up with 12 cockerels, the boys had stubby tails and patchy looking feathers from 3 wks to a month, and their combs came in at about a month looking bright red.) Your Australorp also looks very girlish to me with virtually no comb. The Barred Rock's are a strange breed in that both boys and girls get combs early. We have one of each and the boy had thick bars like yours does. I'm going to guess cockerel based on that. If you need a rooster, BR's are ah-mazing! Ours is so friendly and will actually come sit in your lap. The girl is extremely sweet too. I don't know a lot about Wyandotte's other than we had a gold laced cockerel for a while. His comb was flat like yours but at that stage even it was bright red. That's very good news for you! The Ameraucana looks like a girl, notice how defined her eye stripes are? Boys tend to have very fuzzy around the edges markings. I'm 95% certain your SS is a girl. Ours is a pullet and looked exactly like yours at 3 weeks.
-
-
Some tips on sexing:
- at a month, you will most likely be able to pick out if you have any boys. They will have red or dark pink combs, and if you look under their beak their red wattles will tart coming in.
- the combs on boys tend to be more rounded, and on the top of their heads where pullets have a straight edged comb that will go down their beak some.
- tails are not always a telling sign, but girls usually have bigger tails earlier. Keep an eye on the stubby tailed chicks and monitor their feather growth compared to the others.
- the most helpful thing to do is look up photos, or information about your breeds, some chicks simply take a bit longer in their development and may seem to be cockerels only to turn into beautiful pullets.
- the boys can have thicker legs, but I've seen plenty of girls with stocky legs too.
Overall, chick sexing is a waiting game. Unless you just have a really good feeling you have a cockerel, I would keep them at least two more weeks and then come back and try sexing. I'd hate for you to get rid of a good egg layer!

Hope this helped some!
Thank you for your response it was very helpful. I too have 2 weeks old chicks and were wondering if any were cockerels. I will copy and print your reply. :)
 

New posts New threads Active threads

Back
Top Bottom