What are the hackle feathers?

[jloftin60]

It is said for sexing chickens, at 2-3 months you will see the hackle feathers developing on the males. They will start to get longer and will be more pointed. Where are they located?

 

[ozark hen]

See the bottom of your avatar's neck feathers? that is the hackle area. Just where the neck feathers meet the shoulders of the roo. If he gets upset he raises the hackle feathers...kind of puffs them out.

 

[wclawrence]

All the neck feathers are called hackles. In the males, usually they will be pointed and brightly colored. Also, you will usually see a correlation between the length of the neck-hackles and the feathers of the same type that grow on the roosters back and are called saddle feathers or back-hackles (as opposed to neck-hackles.) The reason I mention this is that some birds have feathers like that in other places as well.

 

[FractalFarmer]

My Sumatra and my Ameracauna "fight" a bit every so often, and the Sumatra's hackle feathers puff out so much it reminds me of a spitting cobra or that hooded spitting dinosaur that ate the bad guy computer programmer in his car in Jurassic Park. Made me really understand the expression "getting your hackles up".

I gotta get a picture of that one of these days!