Four chicks hatched yesterday Saturday Jan 29, a day late. On Friday Nov 20 power to the school had gone out due to the wind event. I do not know how long it was out and feared we may have lost all of the eggs in the incubator.
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The four chicks that hatched all have feathered legs. Two came from Dark Brown Eggs, and two came from Dark Olive Eggs.
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With the addition of two Potbelly pigs the feed boxes had to be moved to keep the pigs out. Today with the help of students we built an enclosure around the boxes.
Breeds with fluffy, bearded faces like Easter Eggers are sometimes wing sexable at hatch. If they were not wing sexed, their fluffy faces make seeing developing wattles almost impossible. Luckily their pea combs can be of some help. 3-week old males will have wider combs with 3 rows of ‘bumps’ visible, the center row being the largest. The rhyme “Three in a row? That bird will crow!” can help you remember that three visible rows of ‘peas’ on a chick’s pea comb likely means male. The young cockerel’s comb will be the watery pink color of light rosé wine. Their feet will be larger and wider, with leg and ankle bones that are visually thicker than a female’s.
Americana and Easter Egger cockerels will often develop rust-colored patches on their shoulders around 6 weeks old. Tail feathers will begin to have tips that arch or curve downward around 5 weeks old. Iridescent blue or green colors that develop during month 2 in their pointy ended, arching tail feathers is one of the most obvious clues that the chick is a cockerel.
By 5 weeks old the wattles are reddening and becoming pendulous. Cockerel’s combs will also begin to grow taller, larger and more blush colored than female hatch mates, whose combs remain a nude champagne color.
At 3 weeks old cockerel chicks suddenly have the skin under their chins flush a popsicle pink color where they will begin to develop wattles. Even just a little tiny bit of barely-there hint of a flush of pink is a cockerel. Any shade of pink in the wattles of a 3 week old is a male. Females have wattles the same translucent nude color as this chick’s beak.
When you go to buy chicks, oftentimes they are already 3 to 7 days old. In many breeds the pullets feather out slightly faster than cockerels, giving you a way to perhaps visually sex the chicks.
Females tend to develop tail feathers much more quickly than males for the first two weeks. Similarly, females have wing feathers that have grown slightly faster – and appear longer – than male chicks of the same age.
Males will often still have fluff nub tails at 7 days old where pullets will have visible tail feathers developing.
Please note that pullets will only feather out faster for the first couple of weeks. Around 15 days old male and female chicks will have similar-looking wings and tails.
Wing sexing can be attempted on many breeds and hybrids. Wing sexing takes such a picky eye that most people find it difficult and give up. Slow-growing dual-purpose breeds are often the hardest to wing sex. Some males will feather quickly and some females will feather slowly, which adds further confusion. It has been my experience that in every hatch around 1/3 of females will hatch with extra-long pin feathers and will, indeed, be female. The rest of the hatch is kind of an educated guess.
Let me begin by saying this is not an easy skill to learn from pictures on a blog. It takes practice. Also helpful is a very picky eye because you are going to be looking for differences measured in mere millimeters.
This also only works on chicks that are 48 hours old or less. By 3 days old most chicks will wing sex as “female”. I have found wing sexing is best done between 12 and 24 hours of hatching when the pin feathers on the tip of the chick’s wings are clearly visible but have not started feathering out, which has begun by day 3. Wing sexing is believed to be up to 85% accurate and mistakes can be made, especially when sexing dual purpose breeds.
Wing sexing is possible because female chicks grow feathers slightly faster than male chicks for the first week or two. Looking at the wingtip of a 12-hour old female chick will reveal very long pin feathers with shorter pin feathers in between each long one in a long-short-long-short pattern. It is the long pin feathers – not just the patterning – that identify a female. To see the pin feathers, you must gently hold the downy fluff on the wing tip out of the way. A female’s pin feathers will likely be easy to view.
Males have shorter pin feathers overall. You will try to move them down out of the way to view the pin feathers and feel like you can’t hardly see them at all. These quite short, hard-to-individually-view pin feathers are indicative of a male. You’ll also notice all the pins seem to be the same stubby length and the shorter pins are difficult to see.
When wing sexing recently hatched chicks, I find it easiest to locate a very obvious female. Closely observing her pin feather patterning helps me start to identify the subtle differences between males and females. If you’re having a hard time, you probably need to wait until the chicks are 12 to 18 hours old when the pin feathers have grown a little more. Wing sexing just-hatched chicks that are not fully dry is extremely difficult.
Leg color sexing is the least reliable sexing method and is folk wisdom, not a true technique.
The saying goes that a chick with darker legs and “smearing” that goes all the way down the leg through the center toe is a female.
In the above image from Hoover’s Hatchery, the female on the left has darker black legs with color that goes all the way down her center toes. The male on the right happens to have smearing through his center toe but his upper legs are lighter and mottled. Since these are a sex-linked hybrid, which means the males are a different color, the male is identified by the yellow spot on his head and not his leg color.
This tip does not work on most breeds, nor on breeds with solid white or yellow-colored legs. I mention it only as an anecdotal way of perhaps increasing your chance of selecting a female from a bin of barnyard mix chicks.
Newly hatched baby chickens are called chicks. They are typically less than 6 weeks old.
Chicks that are fully feathered – around 2 months old – are often called juveniles.
Young female chickens who are not yet old enough to lay eggs are called pullets.
Young male chickens who are not yet old enough to crow or mate hens are called cockerels.
Female chickens who are around 6 months old and have just begun laying their first eggs, which start off small and increase in size over the first month of laying, are called point-of-lay pullets or point-of-lay hens.
Adult female chickens who are laying full-size eggs are called laying hens. When buying a hen the seller should disclose their age.
Hens that are over 2 years old will experience a slow-down in her egg laying, giving only 3-4 eggs per week but still consuming as much feed as a young hen laying 5-7 eggs per week.
Hens that are 3+ years old may be laying very few to zero eggs per week. Do not buy hens 3 years old or older!
This week the farm classes spent time bringing the floor in the coop back up to grade. It became apparent that over the past few years while raking chicken poop that the floor in the coop was being lowered. This week we placed about 12 wheelbarrows full of dirt and sand into the coop. The students also made a latch for the double door into the outdoor farm area.
Beginning around 3 PM on Monday eggs began to hatch. By the end of Tuesday, we had eight hatches, and by the end of Wednesday, we had 14 new chicks! This hatching of chicks would be beset called a snapshot of the farm. All the different colors of eggs that were being hatched in December were selected.
We are calling these chicks the Jan 4th chicks
A BCM hen is laying a dark olive egg. It is stunning. I have begun collecting her eggs after verifying that they are fertile and will hatch some. The hen is a hatchling from the Nov 2020 BCM group I picked up at Magic Mountain.
The farm received two potbelly pigs on December 1, 2021. The pigs were donated by a former student. They are a hit with the students. They both have their own personalities. The black pig loves to have his belly rub, where he will fall onto his side while you continue to rub!
The area received about 5 - 6 inches of rain, unfortunately, the water runoff runs right through the coop.
We had a batch of 9 chicks hatch on December 2nd. The chicks were in room 14 until December 28, where they were moved out into the chicken coop. They were placed in a private cage with two heating lamps and two adult hens that were in need of some care.
The chicks. Two were sold around December 15 to our new math teacher. One chick died in room 13 prior to being moved out into the coop. A second died in the coop. I noticed it sitting by itself under a heat lamp. I could not see anything that looked out of the ordinary, other than it was by itself. The other five chicks look fine.
