What did I do wrong?

[SarahF]

This past spring I incubated 12 eggs. 9 hatched. 7 cockrels 2 hens....what the heck happened?

 

[Yard full o' rocks]

9 out of 12 sounds pretty good to me!!! I have had a couple with "nearly" zero. Are you talking about the roo to pullet ratio? If so, nothing you can do there other than change the Daddy Roo

 

[Year of the Rooster]

Yard full o' rocks :

9 out of 12 sounds pretty good to me!!! I have had a couple with "nearly" zero. Are you talking about the roo to pullet ratio? If so, nothing you can do there other than change the Daddy Roo

Actually, it's the hen that decides the chick gender.​

 

[Yard full o' rocks]

Quote:
Actually, it's the hen that decides the chick gender.

Whooops...I stand corrected. Sorry

 

[dancingbear]

I've noticed in the past, both with chickens and with ducks, that if I had only one or two males, the eggs that hatched would be more males than females. If there were a lot of males, the hatch would be predominantly female.

I've speculated that pheromones might be responsible. Nature's way of trying to maintain balance.

It hasn't happened with us enough times to say for sure, but it seems to be a general tendency.

 

[Year of the Rooster]

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I've always thought of that as the reason why... Makes sense when you need to balance the population out.

 

[paparootzi]

Someone told me that the "shape" of the egg could be a way to know what the gender would be...that if it was rounded on the small end, it was a female and if it was more pointy that it was a rooster??? Is that just an old wives tale?

 

[Year of the Rooster]

Quote:
Yep, Old Wives Tale. Otherwise, roosters wouldn't be so common and hatcheries would be rackin' in the money

 

[paparootzi]

Well, that's a good thing to know. I actually thought about testing the theory out but was too scared that I might get ALL ROOSTERs!

 

[SpunkyTheMonkey]

in theory you'll get about 50/50 but with smaller hatches you're much more likely to get much bigger swings from "normal". go hatch 1000 eggs at once and you'll probably have about 500 roos.

you might get more hatches (of the sizes we're doing) which are mostly roo or mostly pullet but in the end the population still balances itself out.

$0.02: i'd never eaten roo until i moved to greece...i'd never seen it in a shop or on a a menu, now i don't understand why everyone doesn't eat it. silver linings...