Fifth Grade Classroom 21 days of questions

[Mammachix]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your replies. We put a few of them up on the SmartBoard yesterday and read them in class. We also looked at the candling pictures before we candled our eggs. Of 12 eggs, we think 9 are developing. The air cells look good, but not too large, so we are not upping the humidity just yet. Here is a picture of one of the eggs we candled. Our eggs have brown shells, so it was a bit tricky to see them, but we could see a black eye in a couple of them and small moving shadows in a few others.


Here is our new question for you: When the chicks hatch, will we be able to tell which ones are roosters and which chicks are hens?

Thanks for your replies. We have been using the Learning Center as you suggest, but sometimes your replies are a lot more fun to read!!

 

[chickydee64]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your replies. We put a few of them up on the SmartBoard yesterday and read them in class. We also looked at the candling pictures before we candled our eggs. Of 12 eggs, we think 9 are developing. The air cells look good, but not too large, so we are not upping the humidity just yet. Here is a picture of one of the eggs we candled. Our eggs have brown shells, so it was a bit tricky to see them, but we could see a black eye in a couple of them and small moving shadows in a few others.


Here is our new question for you: When the chicks hatch, will we be able to tell which ones are roosters and which chicks are hens?

Thanks for your replies. We have been using the Learning Center as you suggest, but sometimes your replies are a lot more fun to read!!

Good afternoon,
It depends on the breed. Some can be determined at hatch, some within the first few days, others can take weeks to months.=)
Do you know the breed?

 

[chippysmom327]

What kind of chicks are you hatching? If you don't know, could you please tell us the color of the eggs and where you got them? That could help.

Certain breeds of chickens are sex-linked (gender-linked) which means that upon hatching, males will be one color or have certain markings, and females will be another or have certain markings.

If they are not a sex-linked breed, you will not be able to tell until they get a bit older.

 

[Kelsie2290]

Looks like you have a chick in there, good job so far.

Here is our new question for you: When the chicks hatch, will we be able to tell which ones are roosters and which chicks are hens?

Except in a few special cases, you can not tell if chicks are boys or girls just by looking at them when they hatch. You will have to wait until they are older, sometimes a lot older, some breeds like Silkies, can be six or seven months old before you know for sure. With the mix your chicks are, you may not be able to tell on all of them until they are four or five months old for sure, Brahmas can be a slow maturing breed and the peacombs they have make them hard to tell apart sometimes until they are older.

Some signs that we use to tell:

Combs and Wattles. In all breeds, no matter what comb type they have, roosters will usually have a lot bigger combs and wattles than the girls and they will start growing them sooner. Often you will start to see the differences at three or four weeks, and a chick that has bigger combs and wattles than its hatch mates will usually turn out to be a rooster.

Crowing. If a chick crows it is almost always a rooster. Roosters can start crowing fairly early, and it is not unusual for them to start trying to crow at 4-6 weeks, and most of them will by 16 weeks, you do have the occasional rooster who is really quiet and won’t start crowing until he is a lot older. But, by and large, baby roos will have tried to crow by around 16 weeks, they are usually not really good at it, and it sounds funny, but you will hear them trying.

Feathers. Roosters will get different kinds of feathers that the hens do not. Most of the time, the rooster specific feathering will start showing up around 3-4 months old. Sickle tail feathers, are those really big long curved feathers in the tail, only roosters get those. Saddle hackle feathers grow right in front of the tail, in roosters they are long shiny and pointy, and in hens they are short and rounded. Roosters also get pointy Neck hackle feathers, those feathers on the neck; they are also rounded in hens. Roosters that are more than one color, also often get patches of brightly colored feathers on the tops of their shoulders.

A couple of other things to keep in mind when you are comparing chicks…

Feathering Rate. Roosters sometimes grow in their body feathers slower than the hens do A hen will seem to have even feathers covering her whole body, but when you look at the rooster, it will seem to have bares spots, especially down the back and the sides of it chest.

Leg/body Thickness and general size. This is more subjective, but roosters tend to have thicker stouter legs/feet and bodies than the girls do, they also tend to stand more upright and often look like they are standing on their toes. If you look at a chick and think “foot ball player” it could very well be a rooster, if you look at a chick and think “ballerina” it could very well be a girl.

Behavior. Baby roosters often are bossy and bold and obnoxious. If you have a group of chicks, often the first ones that come up to you will be boys. If you have a chick that comes and checks out strange things or challenges you or other animals it will often be a boy. Roosters are supposed to grow up and protect their hens, and often roosters that will be good protectors will start really young. But sparring in chicks (when they face each other and flair their feathers and argue) is not necessarily related to boy/girl, but is more a dominance thing, and some young pullets will spar as much as roosters.

And if all else fails, and in some breeds that have funny feathers or small combs (like Silkies) if you wait long enough, if the chicken lays eggs, you can be absolutely positive it is a hen  And sometimes you do have to wait that long with some breeds.

There are a couple of specific cases where you can tell if a chick is a hen or rooster when it hatches by looking at it.
With some broilers, (chickens like what you find in the grocery store) they use the length of a chicks primary wing feathers to tell if it is a rooster or hen. But, these have to be very special planned crosses and the parent have to have certain genes for slow and fast feather growth for it to work, and it only works for a day or two after hatch.

The down color of a chick can sometimes be used to tell if it is a boy or girl. Again, though, these have to be very special planned crosses and the parents have to have certain color genes for it to work. The big commercial companies have developed their own strains so they can tell by down color at hatch, some very popular egg laying chickens like Red Stars, ISA Browns, or Golden Comets are examples of these are where the father is a special red-colored rooster, and the mother is a special silver/white factor hen, all the boy chicks will be mostly white like mom, and the girl chicks will be mostly red like dad..

 

[Mammachix]

Thank you ! Our chickens are a cross of a light brahma rooster and red hens/Comets. There are a few Plymouth Barred Rock hens too. We can't wait to see what colors the chicks will be!

Here is our new question for this weekend:

Why are some of our eggs dark brown and others are light brown and the eggs in the grocery store are white? What makes eggs different colors?

Thank you!

 

[chippysmom327]

Thank you !  Our chickens are a cross of a light brahma rooster and red hens/Comets.  There are a few Plymouth Barred Rock hens too.  We can't wait to see what colors the chicks will be!

Here is our new question for this weekend:

Why are some of our eggs dark brown and others are light brown and the eggs in the grocery store are white?  What makes eggs different colors?

Thank you!

The actual color of the egg depends on the breed. The exact shade, however, depends on the hen. Only one of my hens lays blue eggs. The eggs she lays each day can vary slightly in the shade.
Here's an example:

Note: The second picture is enhanced with a filter to make the difference more noticeable. In real life, the difference is very noticeable, but the camera changed the color. That's also the reason my thumb is all red.

See the difference in the shade of blue from day to day?

The eggs that you get from the store (that are white) most likely come from white leghorns. They all lay white eggs, and the eggs are all painted to make them all uniform and cover imperfections.

 

[Kelsie2290]

Why are some of our eggs dark brown and others are light brown and the eggs in the grocery store are white? What makes eggs different colors?

Egg Shell Color. What color eggs a chicken lays is genetically determined.

Most eggs are white shelled, with out additional pigments this gives you plain white eggs, like from breeds like the White Leghorn.

Brown eggs, are also actually white shelled: “Brown” eggs are actually brown from pigments called porphyrins that the hen puts over the white egg shell during its formation. Protoporphyrin-IX is the most common pigment in the commercial brown egg layers, they derive it from haemoglobin in their blood. Geneticists think there are like 13 genes that control various shades of brown egg color and the different pigments in general. Chickens that lay various shades of brown are Rhode Island Reds and most commercial egg layers like the Red Stars and ISA Browns.

There are hens that lay eggs with blue shells, these hens produce a pigment called oocyanin which goes into the white egg shell making it blue. Some breeds of chicken, like the Araucana lay a blue egg because of this.

Green eggs are eggs with blue shells that have the brown pigment coating over them. Easter Eggers are what a lot of people call mixed breed chickens that have been bred to lay green eggs.

The various shades of brown, green/blue and tinted eggs all depend on the various pigments the hens put on or in the egg shells while they are making them. What pigments she has available to use depends on her genes.

The shades of color an individual hen lays will also vary from day to day depending on a lot of things, like her diet, the temperature, if she is sick or under stress, how many eggs she has recently laid etc.

Egg shell color is not related to the hens feather color in and of itself, it just happens to be the same in some breeds like White Leghorns.

 

[Tabatha]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2013/09/13/virus-explains-why-some-chicken-eggs-are-blue/

http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2012/01/how-hen-makes-egg-egg-oddities.html?m=1

Here are a few good sites

 

[Mammachix]

We candled our eggs today and still have 8 that look good with big dark shadows. We could still see some movement in them. It's hard to believe they will be hatching in less than a week!

Today we were talking about what to feed the chicks (chick crumble) and how to care for them the first week. Students asked what the favorite food is of our free-range chickens at home. To be honest, it's chicken (rotisseiri chicken to be exact!). They pick the bones so clean. But, the students are wondering, if chickens don't have teeth, how to they digest their food?

I could have explained it, but they would much rather hear your answers. I'd guess that after hearing about the dead mouse we saw one of our hens eat, they'd also love to hear about the strangest thing you've ever seen your chickens eat.

Thanks for your stories!

 

[Kelsie2290]

Lets see, the chicken digestive system.....
The first part is the beak, with which it pecks at and picks up food with.
It then swallows the food and the food moves from the mouth into the esophagus in the throat. From the esophagus food lands in the crop, which is like a pouch it can store the food in for hours, you can often see the crop looking like a balloon at the bottom of the chicken’s neck when it has eaten a lot. The food then goes into the chicken’s stomach, which is really muscular and is called the gizzard.
It is the gizzard that explains why chickens do not need teeth. It grinds the food into tiny bits the chicken can digest using what is called grit. Grit is hard things like rocks or pebbles or sand. So a chicken uses pebbles as teeth.
After the gizzard, the food hits the small intestine, where a lot of vitamins and minerals and nutrients are absorbed. What is left over goes to the ceca then into the large intestine, where a lot of water is removed from the remains of the food. The last step of the leftover indigestible bits of food is the cloaca, where the chicken’s urine (which is actually the white you see in bird droppings) mixes with it. The poo is then passed out of the chicken via the vent, the outside opening of the cloaca.

Chickens are omnivores – meaning that they can and will eat both plants and animals (meat), or pretty much anything and everything is food to them.
The oddest thing I have caught them eating they should not have is one time a car window broke and the glass shattered into little pieces, the chickens ate the pieces as fast as we could pick them up, actually had to chase them all away and put up a fence until we could get the glass picked up. The only thing I could figure is that the glass was such small and shiny bits that that attracted them. It actually didn’t hurt any of them, one time they were glad they had gizzards instead of a regular stomach.
Other things they will eat they should not is styrofoam or any kind of foam/insulation, they seem to like the little crumbly bits, I guess that looks a lot like bread or food crumbles to them.
So far as edible things go, I have caught them eating little frogs and tadpoles, they actually chase the frogs down and catch them, and they will pick tadpoles up out of the mud puddles when they start to dry up. Like yours they eat mice if they find nests, or big ones if they can catch them. Snakes are in trouble if the chickens find them, they are just as happy to eat a snake as a worm.