Hen or Roo? or is it too early to tell?

[1876 Farm]

when there a day old if you look at the few feather starting on there wing, even is a boy uneven is girl

roo

This is really cool, I will have to try that this spring when I hatch some eggs.

Here are some

new pics of the girls

So cute, I like this age!

 

[Lady of McCamley]

One caveat though to feather sexing. It is only reliable on breeds (or hybrids) that have been selected and developed so that the males will slow feather and the females fast feather.

It doesn't work for all breeds or hybrids.

Lady of McCamley

 

[WalkingOnSunshine]

One caveat though to feather sexing. It is only reliable on breeds (or hybrids) that have been selected and developed so that the males will slow feather and the females fast feather.

It doesn't work for all breeds or hybrids.

Lady of McCamley

x2.

It would be awesome if feather sexing worked on all chicks, but it does not. It only works on chicks that were specifically bred to be feathers sexed.

 

[oletymer]

x2.

It would be awesome if feather sexing worked on all chicks, but it does not. It only works on chicks that were specifically bred to be feathers sexed.

so far I've used this method on all my chicks of mixed breeds and its worked for me, do you know what breeds this was ment for? I thought males were slower to feather than females

 

[WalkingOnSunshine]

so far I've used this method on all my chicks of mixed breeds and its worked for me, do you know what breeds this was ment for? I thought males were slower to feather than females

Feather sexing is different than how fast the bird feathers. Feather sexing is looking at the wing feathers of day-old chicks and seeing if the covert and flight feathers are the same length. Some birds are bred so that the males will have covert and primary pin feathers the same length while the females have longer primaries. Yes, some males are slower to feather than some females (as in, get feathers on their bodies, exp. tail feathers) but this is not 100% accurate and many (most, in my experience) get feathers at the same rate as females of the same age.

Here's a discussion of various sexing techniques from Extension.org--cites various university sources. It has photos of feather sexing and a genetics discussion near the bottom. http://www.extension.org/pages/65437/sexing-day-old-chicks-on-small-and-backyard-flocks
And here's a short one from Mississippi State: http://msucares.com/poultry/management/poultry_sexing.html