Ok so my family got our first chickens 4 years ago. We got 5 New Hampshire Red pullets. One day my mom brought my sister & I to a livestock oction (never doing again & don't do it your self). We got 2 sets of 12 chicks (24 chicks in all). So now when we got home we had 5 pullets & 24 mixed chicks, so thats 29 chickens. 2 pullets & 2 chicks were killed my my dog & 2 died of natural causes, so we ended up with 22 chickens. S we started relizing a lot of them were roosters & they started to fight, now we were very new with chickens & didn't now how to tell what was a girl & what was a boy unless that crowed so we asumed most of them were roosters. So obveously we couln't keep all of them. So we got this guy Matt to come over & take all of the roosters to his friends farm who lets all of his roosters free range. So Matt come over & inspects them & he turns to my Mom & me & says, "You only have 2 hens the rest of them are roosters.". We were shocked!!!!!! So at the oction we bought 2 dozen roosters!!!! The 2 hens we had were 2 of the 3 New Hampshire Reds! (the other red was a rooster). So in all we had 20 roosters & 2 hens before us, so Matt took 18 of the roosters away & left us with the red, a pretty EE & the 2 hens. We are NEVER going to a livestock oction EVER again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This could only happen to us I'm telling you! You just can't make this stuff up!
Was the auction for straight run or just that breed? Sounds like a livestock auction to get rid of already sexed chicks in which case your luck is at best 90% roosters. On the other spectrum of sexed pullets you now see the odds of 90% are not really odds just a generous acceptance that there may be SOME roosters after sexing. Some breeds are exceedingly hard to sex, many are not so tough at all but for the experts all of them are miraculously easy. A general across the board of 90% accurate is a low ball figure. The people who do this stuff every day are incredibly accurate.
The *auction was selling everything & didn't give any info! just that this was a box of chicks.......
My first foray into chickens happened when this truck pulled up our driveway and the guy had boxes full of chicks in the back. Told us he drove hundreds of miles to deliver the chicks and the people who ordered them didn't want them anymore... Of course they were all hens... Of course I believed him. So we bought 30, feeling sorry for the little guys. I was a bit surprised when the guy added another 10 free of charge... We built a coop and raised a bunch of lovely roosters and got exactly ONE hen.
You guys are hilarious!!! I would be so bummed out if I had all roo's like that. At least my sister kind of gave me a heads up as to what to do, and when we picked up the 6 new chicks last year at the feed store they said they had all been sexed as females. I didn't get one roo in that bunch. We got 3 Orps and 3 Americaunas. Although I believe one of them is part taracactyl. She doesn't cluck like a hen she screams. It is such a crack up. Its amazing how we all learn life lessons.
Ours isn't as bad as that our first batch of 20 were all hens. My Speckled sussex was the only straight run and thankfully also female the rest were sex links and I now know that you can sex them easily. Our silkies turned out to be 1 hen 1 roo this last year the guy at the feed store we bought them from said around 80% of silkie chicks are roos not sure if thats true or not. Then got 2 ee's both roos got rid of them. 5 barred rocks 2 were killed before they fully matured and the last 3 were 2 roos and 1 hen. Now we got 5 more chicks and I am thinking the 2 austalorps may both be roos. I feel for you people who get all these roos get attached and then have to get rid of them. thankfully the silkie and barred rocks I got to keep.
