The feather sex was wrong!

[Susan Skylark]

I went and culled by cull pen today: 1 neutered male with attitude, 3 male chicks and what was supposed to be a ginger Italian male. The last one had an egg and a functioning female repro tract but it had no chest spots at all and was over 4 months old (my hens lay at 7-9 weeks and I have lights) and had never laid an egg yet (it was in the cull pen for several weeks). It was a shipped egg and weird from the start, it was lame and never exhibited male behaviors or had foam so I figured it was an infertile male. No, a wonky female but no spots on the chest! The egg was kind of watery inside too. Very weird, nice bird but probably not a great replacement hen with its other oddities. Anybody else ever had a feather sexable bird with the wrong plumage?

 

[catesquire]

Oh interesting! Maybe some kind of intersex bird? I've had two jumbo brown males that got red chest feathers but kept all their chest spots into adulthood as well. Culled so I didn't have to deal with them passing those confusing genetics on to any babies!

Those were in my first ever set of eggs, I was SO confused at how everyone was feather-sexing their browns so easily while I was staring at those two, lol