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..
