Hello, new chicken owners from Oz. Girls or boys, what have we got?

[PeterA]

Well we brought home some baby chicks from school. There are now much bigger and we want to find out how many hens we have and if we have any roosters.

All up we have five chickens. See the pics.

Peter
Australia


Chicken 1


Chicken 2


Chicken 3


Chicken 4


Chicken 5

 

[donrae]

1 and 2 are hens, 3-5 are roosters.

wait---how old are they?

 

[BarredRocks3]

To me it looks like the first 4 are red sex links and the last one is a black sex link. If I am correct then you have two roosters, chicken number 3&4.

 

[PeterA]

28th of may the chickens hatched. So that's about 9 week old or so.

 

[PeterA]

At how many weeks should they start dropping eggs?

 

[Tricoglossus]

Hi from Perth, WA. Where in Australia are you? Chickens 1-4 look like Isa browns or Hy-line browns, which are the commercial hybrids used for egg production in Australia. Sex-linked means that you can tell what sex they are from the time of hatching. They are produced like this so the males can be euthanased when they hatch (in the commercial hatcheries). Females are brown and males are white. The last chicken pictured is quite dark, it doesn't look like a commercial egg layer, I'm not sure about that one.

 

[Tricoglossus]

Oh and the commercial layers are at point of lay at about 17 weeks old.

 

[PeterA]

Wow that's cool, how they can do that brown and white female/male thing.

 

[BarredRocks3]

Wow that's cool, how they can do that brown and white female/male thing.

The hybrid combination for the red sex link is a male white rock and a Rhode Island Red hen so, males got the white rock look with a little bit of red and the females have white streaks but their mainly reddish.