Ok so in my first hatch i set 13 and hatched 5. of those 5 4 were roos!!!! Now i'm a little paranoid. I presently have 23 chicks (my second hatch went much better than my first) but again i fear that most of them are roos! can anyone help me out? They are 8 weeks old. i know that i have 1 female phoenix and 1 male... but with the cochins, silkies, and ameraucana/araucana crosses i just can't tell!!! (or maybe i don't want to because i count a whole lot of boys) I also want to sell some of them but would like to be able to sell pairs or at least tell who is probably a girl from boy... do cochin girls show red in their wattles so young? these were born 4/30. Let me know what you think please. Thank you!
I see a few boys in there, but mostly they look like girls. Excluding the silkies because it's too early on them.
I was chatting to a lady who recently did an experiment. ok, she hatched some eggs and she had alot of roos, and she said she had set alot of pointed eggs, so she researched it and found out the more rounded eggs will most likely be female chicks, and more pointed eggs will be roosters, so she tried it and set 20 pointed eggs and ended up with 18 roosters and 1 hen and the other egg didn't hatch. and the next year she set 20 more eggs that were more rounded and she ended up with 19 hens and 1 rooster. don't take this from me I have not tried this with chicken eggs! But I have tried this with duck eggs and i set only more rounded eggs and out of 20 eggs i had 4 drakes and and 15 hens, the other 1 died in its shell. I actually do believe this is a way to control how many roosters and hens you have. remember: more rounded eggs= hens, and pointed eggs=roosters
lol thanks! so then cochin girls do have some pink in their comb this early on??? There is also some slower tail feather development in some of them... i was told that may be a boy trait as well... ??? and i think there were a fair amount of rounded eggs in this batch! but who am i to really tell.... i ordered... the eggs came... and about a month later there was magical peeping! i'll have to remember that though when setting my own eggs... i have one hen that is presently laying very pointy pink eggs (as she is supposed to be a pure bred wheaten ameraucana i wouldn't hatch out her eggs anyhow)... in fact she almost always lays those types... does that mean she is potentially making lots of little boys?