Please forgive this naive question....NOW WITH PHOTOS (finally)

Yep. The first dozen or so roosters I had all crowed around 16-17 weeks. In the spring I had a 9-week-old bantam cochin cockerel do a decent crow. About a week ago I heard a screetchy sound coming from the "nursery" in my coop, currently occupied by chicks only a few weeks old. This morning I captured this on video (note: the light in the coop was too dim to capture a picture but listen for what a 3-4 week old chick sounds like when it crows:
HEchicken, It seems to be a bad link. Nothing happens even when I copied the url and tried to open in another browser
 
HEchicken, It seems to be a bad link. Nothing happens even when I copied the url and tried to open in another browser

Sorry about that...it was late here and I was tired - I guess I grabbed the wrong link. I've fixed the link in the original post but here it is again so you don't have to go back a page:
 


Here are my 2 week old Cuckoo Marans that we just got to add to our flock. The person we got them from said they are not sex linked (?) and was not sure of the sex. We checked the wing feathers to see if we could figure it out after going online and finding a way to check. It basically said that if the leading wing feathers are different from the other feathers, its a good chance they are hens. He had 50 or so chicks and I think we got 3 girls, but only time will tell. We are not allowed roosters in our town, so we will wait and see.
The site also said that the spot on their head is also an indicator, but its confusing to determine.
 
I have 2 CuckooMarans....both are females, but I can tell you that CuckooMarans are very 'individual' chickens.......my one girl started laying eggs at 5 months old, but her 'sister' just started laying at 8 months of age! (They are from the same hatch)......
The cuckoo roo will be lighter in feather color than the hen......~Beulah
 
I have 2 CuckooMarans....both are females, but I can tell you that CuckooMarans are very 'individual' chickens.......my one girl started laying eggs at 5 months old, but her 'sister' just started laying at 8 months of age! (They are from the same hatch)......
The cuckoo roo will be lighter in feather color than the hen......~Beulah
Hmmmm, thanks! That's now 3 different ways to distinguish sex. Sorry 4! Feather length, spot on the head, feather color, and the vent. Which one, or two of three? HA!
 
Hmmmm, thanks! That's now 3 different ways to distinguish sex. Sorry 4! Feather length, spot on the head, feather color, and the vent. Which one, or two of three? HA!

There are multiple ways to sex chicks! Vent sexing is a skilled profession but can be used on any chick to quite accurately determine gender at hatch. It involves looking at the vent and the male organ will be visible (to the trained eye) while the female vent will look different. I would caution against trying this at home though, as it is quite possible to damage the chick if one doesn't know what one is doing (like me). Hatcheries employ vent sexers who can sex an amazing number of chicks per hour, with 90% or greater accuracy (meaning that even the experts do make the odd mistake).

Feather sexing only works on some breeds of chicks and only at a certain stage of wing feather development.

The spot on the head is an auto-sexing method that again, only works with some breeds. Barred breeds are among them.

Feather color will work on auto-sexing breeds and sex-linked birds at hatch (cockerels will hatch one color; pullets another). On other breeds feather color comes into play as they feather out. For example, Barred Rocks (and I believe Cuckoo Marans also) start to differentiate visibly by 3-4 weeks when they are feathering out. While both are black/white barred, the females will look more black, with narrow white bars, while the males will look more white, with narrower black barring. It is most obvious when you look at two of them side by side, but you can probably see some examples if you go to the breeds database and look up those breeds.
 
Thank you for the info. I read most of that online. As they are now two weeks old I can see one is more white than the others and that one looks to be forming a crown earlier than the other two. That would stink if its a roo since we are not allowed to have them and no one is willing to take it, for the same reason.
My EE had the same issues. One of the flock looked to be getting a large crown and waddle, but it would up only growing in a bit more than stopped. Turned out to be a hen after all.

I guess we will just wait and see what turns out.
 
Is there an age where I might expect roosters, if I have them, to start crowing?

I have 4 nine-week old Cuckoo Marans (one, possibly two, of whom I am freaking out about maybe being roosters as roosters aren't allowed in my town) and 4 nine-week old New Hampshire Reds.

So far, every single one of them peeps. No cluck cluck noises even, all peep. (though one, when surprised when putting in the coop one night did let out a very grown up 'bah GAH' noise).

The comb on one of the Marans is just slightly bigger than the others, but then again "she" is also smaller than the others. Tail feathers all look the same size to me on all of them.

Two of my bigger Reds have wattles just a tiny bit longer than the other girls' but otherwise everything looks the same.

SO, very naive and possibly unanswerable question but if anyone can assist, I'd be very grateful!

ETA: Ok so here are the photos. Yes I'm pretty sure that I have two boys here, based on their much lighter color if nothing else. Combs aren't *too* much bigger than the other Marans. Their body types look exactly the same to me, but I readily admit that I am wishing them female every time I look at them.



This is Enox, taken today at 9 weeks 3 days (ish)



This is Haw taken for comparison. 9 weeks 3 days



Haw and Enox. Enox is actually smaller than the other Marans.



Stella, the other hopefully girl. "She" is the next smallest. Same age, 9 weeks, 3 days .

I couldn't get a good photo of Georgia, the other Marans, but she is dark, like Haw. While I've felt from the start that Enox would be my dominant hen, I have actually seen that the definite girls have been the bossier ones.
When I look at the 3rd photo, I think the lighter one is a roo, just going by the comb and the feathers towards the tail, they look a little long. My EE roo started crowing at about 13-14 weeks, my bantam brahma at 8 weeks, and my barred rock at 18 weeks. You can never tell when they will first crow.
 

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