Male and Female Specific Feather Patterns in Chicks? Examples?

[RememberTheWay]

This may not be what you are asking but Down here (Australia) most pure lines of heritage breeds have the slow feathering gene, meaning at the 3 to 4 week old mark when they start to feather in, the males will have bald shoulders and no or very short pin feather tails, while the girls will be almost completely feathered. I will see if I can find pictures from last year. If not I'll get some in a few weeks, first batch due to hatch next weekend.

Very interesting. All my opinions (male and female) were super slow to feather. From what I understand the rate of feathering being different between male and female must be selected for and bred into a line. Example - the cream and opal legbar chicks I shipped in this week are auto sexing at hatch so this is irrelevant but I did notice (not across the board but some of them) that some males were growing in wing feathers very slow, 14 days and just had wing tips while some of the females had wing feathers almost to the back end already in length. But some of the females had short wing feathers and some of the males had longer feathers. If they weren't already sexable by color and I wanted to breed that difference in I would mark the female chicks with the fastest feathering rate and the boys with the slowest and then only breed from those birds going forward. As you can see though if you didn't pay attention later on and select towards it you would very quickly have chicks that were not sexable by feather rate especially because it has to paid attention to early on and those chicks permanently id'd and then breeders selected only from within the group that showed correct feathering rate at hatch

 

[everyday_farmlife]

This may not be what you are asking but Down here (Australia) most pure lines of heritage breeds have the slow feathering gene, meaning at the 3 to 4 week old mark when they start to feather in, the males will have bald shoulders and no or very short pin feather tails, while the girls will be almost completely feathered. I will see if I can find pictures from last year. If not I'll get some in a few weeks, first batch due to hatch next weekend.

Here are some photos as promised
Note the first photo they are only 2 weeks old but the pullet is already sprouting shoulder feathers and the start of a tail.
At 4 weeks it is very clear the pullet has an almost fully feathered back, the males is still very bald.
I understand not everyone has the slow feathering gene in their line. We breed towards this.
Chicks are pure light sussex