Help! I can no longer Keep Silent!

[amarook]

Quote:
Sounds like you are in the same predicament I'm in.

I have 6 and they are all roosters. They are golden red sexlink chicks.

Mine are 5 weeks old and just starting to get some little markings on their wings.

Here's the one I'm keeping.

I'm going to give one or 2 to my neighbor because he doesn't have a roo.
And the rest we are probably going to eat, because I can't keep that many roos.


Here is a link to my album for these chicks.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/amarook/sets/72157616445024904/

ETA
I've done a lot of research on this lately, because my chicks were a complete mystery to me.
This particular crossing seems to be derived from a RIR Roo, and a plymouth rock hen.

Here's a link.
http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/CGP/Sex-links/BRKSexLink.html

I think this is what my boys are going to look like.

 

[highcountrychickens]

There are no stupid questions! Especially here. Nearly everyone here has been a beginner at some point, I have been at this since 2000, and I'm still a beginner!
I think it is adorable that your DH brought some chicks home... no, I don't think they're as advertised, but someone else here will be better at deciphering what you have than me - that said, it wouldn't be the first time, or the one-hundred-thousanth that a rooster was inadvertently counted into the flock, I bought 8 Columbian Wyandotte chicks last spring "guaranteed" to be all pullets... two turned out to be Roos. (Hatcheries often throw in a few male chicks into an order to help keep the batch warm during shipping, and answer the misbalance between demand for pullets and cockerels - these are rather sweetly called "Peanuts"... the new name for each suspected cockerel in our bunches)
As for what to do with them? I gifted one of mine to a local B&B with farm animals for children, and the other sadly met another end this spring. There are all kinds of options, from soup pot to farmers...

You can still order chicks through one of the hatcheries, (great resource page here with lists of hatcheries and tons of reviews) Sometimes you will be able to find a BYCer with chicks hatching, and I know for a fact many smaller farm stores are still getting chicks (Just saw an order come in yesterday on a trip to Idaho Falls, ID)

I hope you can stay on the laughing side of this... there's really no reason to be mortified!

Good luck!!

 

[yotetrapper]

Definitely cornish. You can NOT let them live, as as they get older, their legs give out. Fire up the skillet.

 

[lakeshorenc]

Here are some pictures of my cross between a RIR roo and a WLH hen. I think they are called Amber links or Red Sex links or Gold Sex links. I haven't really found out what to call them yet. They are 5 weeks old, you can definitely tell the Roo from the hen. Yours look bigger than mine.

 

[Southernbelle]

Can you post more pictures of them, so we can be sure? I thought they looked more like a white rock pullet than a cornish, but I'd like to see more pictures if you have them.

 

[walkswithdog]

If it's just a white rock, it could be a pullet.

It looks to thin to be a cornish cross at that age, legs too thin, stance too thin.

If it really is a sexlink then yep boy.

 

[Wateredgarden11]

Ok here are a few more pictures. Boy I am really lousy at this picture taking through hardware cloth. Looking at these chickens it does seem to me that one of them has more comb than the others and that bird's comb is pinker. Yikes! That bird also appears larger than the other five.

 

[Quail_Antwerp]

I have Amberlink Sex links, which TSC also had this year, and the chicks are more yellow than the Gold Sex links...and they are white...and later they will have some brown feathering on their wings...It will look like someone took a paint brush and just rubbed bits of brown on them here and there, or they could be mostly white.

I'll take some pics of mine later. I have 5 hens, all Amberlinks, all white right now. They are only a few weeks old.

 

[cindyanne1]

I tell you what, the middle chicken and the chicken to the right (as you're looking at the picture) look so much like my Leghorns. The only one that looks a bit different from them is the one on the left. Could it be that you have one roo and the rest pullets, but the same breed? Were the chicks an all over, even, light yellow color?

Here's a pic I just took yesterday of one of my Leggies. It's a bit blurry because the camera focused on the fence.

My bird and your birds could be sisters, lol!

Edited to fix the pic... it was HUGE! Give me a second...

 

[SunAngel]

Those definitely do not look like the legs of meat chickens...way too skinny. Unless they get some random specks of black, brown or tan in their feathers, they are most likely Leghorns.