So I thought I’d update. These two are actually both looking like pullets. From what I’ve read partridge generally have black chest feathers at this stage if they are male. I will let you know if anything changes.
I’m also a little disappointed in their shank color they aren’t white but slate. I will have to get a male with good white legs hopefully I can breed this out.
Your chicks are giving me so much hope! I have quite a few with the black wing feathers and was starting to despair, but if yours with the black wing feathers can still turn out so uniformly patterned and female-looking, then maybe there's hope. I'm guessing because Jeff has been mixing in other colors, the pattern is probably not developing consistently and throwing false signs... like the black wing feathers...
I found some pictures from last year, and it seems that the breast took quite a while to turn black. The neck did first, and looks to be a more reliable marker.
Here's my boy at 3 weeks, showing some black feathers but not as much black as on some of my chicks right now (or yours from the earlier photo):
At 4 weeks, the breast is coming in patterned, but you can see that the neck is starting to turn black, and the back is looking darker, too:
At 5 weeks, the breast is getting its first splash of black:
At 6 weeks, the breast's splash of black is growing, and the neck, tail and pants are already looking very black and break up the pattern:
In some lines, full grown females do have black tails, but not in the ones in the photos on the Papa's Poultry website. Or at least not much anyway. And the neck and pants definitely don't have black on them. So I'll be watching out for that black neck, because the neck feathers did seem to come in black from the start, not like the breast which started out patterned but turned black later, and even then, took until near maturity to turn completely black.
Here he is at 10 weeks, with the breast still more splotchy than black, but the head and neck are completely black:
He didn't end up with a black head and neck when full grown, interestingly. They eventually turned orange. Here he is at 7 months old:
Given that neither the males nor the females have black heads and necks when mature, though, I don't know how much the adolescent black head/neck on my boy is indicative of his boyhood... I only had him of that color, and I can't for the life of me find pictures of adolescent partridge orps online, so I actually have no idea if the neck is a good early sign or not....