How to Sex Chicks and Chickens

It’s the dilemma that every homesteader will face at some point in their chicken raising experience… how to tell if a chick is a pullet or a cockerel? Knowing how to sex chicks and chickens is a helpful skill to have on the homestead. Being able to tell male chicks from female chicks at a young age can be helpful for selling chicks and planning out how to manage your flock. As the chicks grow older, it will be easier to distinguish the sexes, but some helpful tips can make sexing those young birds easier and more accurate!

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Why is Sexing Chicks Important?

Many of us already have our reasons for wanting to sex our chicks or chickens. Aside from wanting to know who’s males and who’s female, there are a couple of important reasons you will want to pay attention to sexing your chicks:

• manage male to female ratio– having too many young cockerels in with too few young pullets will cause stress in the young flock
• so you can plan for what to do with your extra roosters– it’s a fact or chicken keeping, you never need as many rooster as hens, so it’s a good idea to have a plan for those extra roosters that you end up with
• to pick for showing purposes– some shows require that you exhibit your chickens as a pen (3 chickens all of the same sex), a pair (male and female), or a trio (1 male and 2 females)

Knowing what sex your chicks are going to be as they grow and mature into full-grown adults will help you as you manage your growing flock and make plans for how you will manage them in the future!

General Sexing Tips

Before we dive into sexing chicks and chickens, I want to go over a few general sexing tips. When it comes to sexing chickens, there are a few main features that you will be examining to determine males from females. What you examine and how accurate your sexing is will be determined by the age of the chicken. As chicks, many chicken breeds make it hard to tell males from females apart from each other. These are the main factors you will be examining or observing to determine males from females in the homestead flock:

• feathering– hens and roosters have different feather features
• behavior– hens and roosters will have characteristic behaviors that may be present even at a young age
• facial features– the size of the comb and wattles can indicate sex
• build– the overall body build of a chick can indicate whether it is a male (stocky and thick), or a hen (often slimmer, thinner build)

How easy your chicks and chickens are to sex will be breed dependent. The more you raise and observe chicks, and specifically a certain breed, the better you will become at recognizing young male chicks from young female chicks. Nonetheless, there are a few sexing methods that have been developed in an attempt to accurately sex chicks at a young age. These are the main methods we will be discussing for sexing both chicks and adult chickens:

• auto-sexing breeds (color sexing)
• sex linked breeds (color or feather sexing)
• vent sexing
• sexual dimorphism

Auto-Sexing Chicks

Auto-sexing breeds and sex-linked breeds are two different ways of sexing chicks at a young age using genetics to affect male and female chick coloring.

An auto-sexing breed is a straightbred variety or breed of chicken. This means that males and females of that variety can be bred together and still produce offspring with the same auto-sexing features. Autosexing features are usually based on the coloring of the chicks. Examples of auto-sexing breeds include:

Auto-sexing Breeds

• barred & cuckoo breeds/varieties– Males are paler with irregular or elongated spots on the head. Females are darker, smaller, have narrow head spots and yellow toes.
• black-breasted red & silver duckwing breeds/varieties– Males have a light dorsal stripe that ends with a dot on the head. Females simply have a dark dorsal stripe.
• Buckeye, New Hampshire Red & Buff Orpingtons– Males have a white/cream spot on the upper wing. Females have a dark spot on their head or a dorsal stripe.
• Rhode Island Red– Males have a white/cream spot on their belly and wing. Females are a darker brown/red in color.
• light brown & silver Leghorn, dark Cornish & Welsummer– Males have lighter dorsal stripes. Females have dark dorsal stripes.
• dark Norwegian Jaerhon– Males have a large head spot while females have a small head spot.
• light Norwegian Jaerhon– Females have a brown dorsal stripe.
• crele Penedesenca– Males are gray whereas females are brown.

All these features relate to young chick coloring, not adult chicken coloring. Auto-sexing is about 80-95% accurate depending on the breed. This information is condensed from Hatching & Brooding Your Own Chicks by Gail Damerow.

Note: Dorsal stripes are colored stripes that run down the back of a chick. On chicks that exhibit dorsal stripes, there is usually a pair of dorsal stripes that run down either side of the backbone.

Sex-Link Chicks

A sex-linked chicken breed is a hybrid, or a cross between two breeds, that uses sex-linked genes to produce offspring that can be sexed by their color or their feather growth. Since sex-linked chicken breeds are a mix of two different breeds, the offspring cannot be bred together to produce sex-linked chicks. Here are a few examples of sex-linked hybrid chickens:

Sex-Linked Hybrids

• California White– California Gray cock X white Leghorn hen
• Black Star, Black Sex-Links, Black Rock– Rhode Island Red or New Hampshire X barred Plymouth Rock hen
• Red Sex-Links, Golden Comet, Cinnamon Queen– Rhode Island Red or New Hampshire X white Plymouth Rock or Delaware hen

Sex-linked hybrid chicks can be sexed based off of their down coloring.

Sex-link hybrid crosses are also used to create feather sexed chicks. For feather sexing, the chicks are sexed based on whether they develop their primary wing feathers quickly or more slowly. Feather sexing is only accurate if the chicks are sexed within a day or two of hatching, otherwise the feather growth equals out for both males and females. An example of a feather sexing hybrid would be if you crossed a Rhode Island Red hen with a white Leghorn cock. Male chicks would be slow feathering while female chicks would be fast feathering. Feather sexing is about 99% accurate in feather sex-link hybrids.

Sexing Day Old Chicks

Chicks that are only a few days old can be sexed by auto-sexing or sex-link sexing if they are of those specific breeds. As the chicks mature and start replacing their fluffy down, auto-sexing and feather sexing will get more difficult and less accurate. Sex-link hybrids that can be sexed by color will continue to develop in different colored plumage since adult males and females will be two different varieties.

But what if you have a breed that is neither auto-sexing nor sex-linked? Can you still sex the young chicks? For sexing day-old chicks, there is one more option, but it is not ideal for the homestead flock raiser.

Sexing chicks by vent sexing is a little tricky. Vent sexing is the process of determining a chick’s sex by looking for a slight difference in the cloaca, which is located just inside the vent. Female chicks will have female reproductive parts that male chicks will be lacking. Since a chick’s vent is so tiny, and the difference that you are looking for is so small, vent sexing is tricky and can be harmful to the chick if it is not done correctly. For that reason, it is not often advised that homestead flock raisers practice vent sexing.

At commercial hatcheries, vent sexing is used to sort male chicks from female chicks for filling orders. This is done by a specially trained professional who has experience. Even then, the success rate of vent sexing is about 95-98% accurate.

Sexing Juvenile Chickens

Once auto-sexing, sex-link sexing, and vent sexing are ruled out, the homestead flock raiser is typically left with one more option… sexual dimorphism. Sexual dimorphism is a method of sexing growing chicks based on observable changes in development and behavior.

As the chicks mature, sexing them by sexual dimorphism becomes easier. The males and females will being to develop features that reveal their sex. If you watch your chicks, you will also be able to see behaviors that will differentiate between males and females. Generally, after 3 weeks of age is when you can start gradually sexing your chicks based off of their development and behavior. Trying to sex your chicks before 3 weeks of age using sexual dimorphism is nearly impossible since distinguishable characteristics haven’t yet developed.

When starting to sex your chicks using sexual dimorphism, watch for these sex-indicating features and behaviors:

Features

• Cockerels (young males)-
  • larger comb
  • redder facial features (if the breed has red racial features)
  • longer tail
  • pointer feathers- developing pointed hackle feathers (neck feathers) and pointed saddle feathers (rump feathers)
  • thicker legs
  • stockier body build
• Pullets (young females)-
  • smaller comb
  • shorter tail
  • rounded feathers, especially notice on the neck and back
  • thinner, more petite build

Behaviors

• Cockerels (young males)-
  • play sparring with other males- raised hackle (neck) feather, mock fights
  • crowing
  • more alert
  • less scared or flighty
  • tidbitting (making quick clucks to call the females over to a food morsal)
  • as sexual hormones set in, the cockerels will become interested in mounting the females
  • courting- a cockerel will drop one of his wings and dance around the pullet to court her
• Pullets (young females)-
  • often shrink down or crouch at signs of perceived danger
  • may squat and hold her wings out to the side slightly in the traditional mating position when you go to pick her up
  • will be more concerned with hanging out with other pullets and establishing a pecking order with them- minor pecking squabbles may occur
  • may start responding to a young cockerel’s tidbitting or courting behavior

The first feature you will want to keep an eye out for in your growing chicks are the changes that occur in the comb growth. In most breeds, males will traditional exhibit a larger comb even at a young age. This has been the most reliable feature that I watch for when sexing my growing chicks.

As the chicks get older, more features and behavior will become apparent until you can sex each individual with 100% accuracy based on their appearance and behaviors.

It depends on the breed for when you will be able to determine a chicks sex based off of sexual dimorphism. In some breeds, sexing the chicks can begin as early as 2-3 weeks old. Other breeds take longer to develop their characteristic sexual features, and you may not be able to see any noticeable differences until closer to 4-5 weeks of age.

Sexing Adult Chickens

Generally, by the time your chicks are 6-7 weeks old, you should be able to sex your brood with 100% accuracy. You will be able to tell which ones are cockerels and which ones are pullets based off of their feathering, facial features, and behaviors.

To wrap things up, I want to cover some of the most distinguishable features that you should be familiar with when sexing any chicken. When raising a flock or evaluating someone else’s flock, it is always good to be able to recognize the males from the females. In the chicken world, different age males and females are called different names:

• chick– a baby chicken who has not been sexed
• cockerel– a male chicken under 1 year of age
• pullet– a female chicken under 1 year of age
• cock or rooster– a male chicken over 1 year of age
• hen– a female chicken over 1 year of age

Distinguishing pullets from cockerels or hens from roosters in a flock is easy when you know what distinguishable features to look for. Here are the features to look for in fully feathered young chickens or adult birds:

Males (cockerels, roosters/cocks)

• longer, more pointed hackle feathers (neck feathers)
• pointed saddle feathers that flow over the rump at the base of the tail
• longer, curved tail feathers
• a long, main sickle tail feather in the tail
• spurs- these are sharp, pointy, toe-like looking features on each one of the male’s shanks, they are used for fighting and defending
• large comb and long, large wattles
• brighter colored facial features
• coloring may be different- in some breeds, the male’s feathers are more brightly colored; in sex-link hybrids the male is usually a completely different variety (color) than the females
• Behaviors– tidbitting, courting, mounting hens, crowing, watchful behavior, alertness, sparring with other males, settling disputes amongst the females

Females (pullets, hens)

• shorter, rounded hackle feathers (neck feathers)
• rounded, short rump
• a shorter, blunt tail
• no main sickle tail feather in the tail
• Note: some hens of certain breeds will develop spurs
• smaller comb and wattles
• coloring may be different- in sex-link hybrids the female is usually a completely different variety (color) than the male
• Behaviors– squatting for mating, egg laying, egg song, broodiness
• Note: if a flock is comprised of all hens and there is no rooster present, the head hen of the flock may take over some of the duties of a protective rooster and may exhibit behaviors such as being more watchful for settling flock disputes

One thing to be aware of is that some breeds are considered ‘hen-feathered’, meaning the rooster’s and the hen’s feathering and coloring are nearly identical. With those breeds, it’s best to distinguish males from females based on facial features and behaviors. Sebrights and Campines are two breeds in which the males are hen-feathered.

What to Do With Roosters!

So, you’ve sexed your chicks and you realize that you have too many roosters. Unfortunately, with chickens, they have about a 50/50 gender ratio. However, it’s best to have just one rooster for every 10-12 hens. What can you do with your extra male chicks?

I’ve compiled a list of ways you can kindly deal with your extra roosters in my article What To Do With Roosters!

If you are interested in keeping a rooster in your homestead flock, check out the many reasons why it’s helpful to have a rooster with your hens!

Whether you can sex your day-old chicks right from the get-go or if you have to wait a few weeks in order to make a more accurate prediction, knowing how to sex chicks and chickens is an important skill of the homestead chicken raiser! Whenever I hatch chicks with my incubator or a let a broody hen hatch out a brood, it’s always fun to play the guessing game and guess at which chicks are males or females. The more you raise and observe chicks, the better at guessing their sex you will become! Auto-sexing and sex-linked breeds make it easy, but for other breeds, sexing the chicks through sexual dimorphism can be fun!

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by Alexa