Most of the time I don't see what sets her off, but one day I was out near the coop and saw a large cicada just escape her capture. That got her going. She screamed at the top of the privacy fence, over which it disappeared, for quite some time. Sore loser, that one.
Yep, I agree. There can be degrees of light and dark as well, in both males and females, but body type and the saddle feathers also are good clues, above and beyond color. Color can fool you sometimes. Raised so many BRs of varying quality, been there a few times.
TNBEAR - thanks for posting pics! A couple comments just by way of feedback:
It could just be the picture, where the sun is in the sky, or clouds...but, the two pullets facing the camera appear to be brownish. Compare them in the pic (click on it to increase size) to the pullet walking to the right in the pic - do you see the difference? She (pullet walking to right) has much more crisp penciling than the other two - this is the "smuttiness" that we refer to with the breed. Many breeders have bred in the Partridge variety to improve type, and in my opinion, this is leftover from those variety crosses. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, it's just something to be aware of and clean up, of course, AFTER you have culled for type - which always should come first.
We often don't realize just how faded the penciling has become in the Silver Penciled variety; when you go to APA poultry shows, check out the bantam variety of the breed; typically, you will see VERY crisp pattern/color in them. Those little guys are so eye catching! If we could only transfer that to the large fowl...
Kudos to you for choosing this difficult variety! OH, I also wanted to mention to closely watch your males; they appear to be in very close quarters, which typically results in a whole lot of fighting when they reach sexual maturity. Some folks believe if they are raised together, you will not have these issues, but often, they'll seem like the best of buddies one day, and the next, they're tearing each other's combs off. Just be careful!
Yup. I'm 100% positive the lighter is male and about 99% on the darker one for the same reason. Pictures sometimes are misleading, but I also thought I saw saddle feathers coming in on that darker one.
oh, Fred, you may be interested in this guy as well. Cetawin owns him, hatched him from eggs I gave her. He's out of Isaac and another of my Stukel hens, my Wynette. He looks at about 5-6 weeks old to be turning out like Indy-you can tell even through the cage bars. Just look at that barring on this DelaRock! I'm sure she won't mind me showing these photos she sent me today of Iggy.
