Hen? Rooster? How Can I Tell?

Question

What is the difference between a male chick and a female chick?

Answer 1

It is really hard to tell. wait for a couple of months depending if they are organic chickens lol.

Answer 2

A young chicken is called a chick. A male chicken is a c**k or a cockerel, depending on its age. Similarly, a female chicken is called a pullet or a hen. The age at which a pullet becomes a hen and a cockerel becomes a c**k depends on what type of chicken is being raised. Purebred poultry producers have very age-specific definitions. A chicken is a cockerel or pullet if it is less than one year of age. After one year of age, the chicken is referred to as a hen or c**k. In the commercial chicken industry a female chicken is called a hen after it begins egg production (around five months of age). A sexually mature male chicken (again, around five months of age) is referred to as a rooster.

The observable differences in secondary s*x characteristics between the male and female chicken are referred to as sexual dimorphism.

Typical differences between a rooster ( Figure 1 ) and a hen ( Figure 2 ) include:

The male has a larger body, comb, and wattles than the female.

In single-comb birds the male's comb will be turgid and stand erect, whereas the female's may flop over on one side.

The male has a larger, more developed spur than does the female.

Roosters crow, while hens do not.

In multicolored varieties, the male will have more variety of coloring in his plumage than the female.

The male has longer and more pointed hackle feathers than the female.

The male and female both have main tail feathers, but only the male has saddle feathers.

FOR CHICKS

Chick sexing is the method of distinguishing the s*x of chicken and other hatchlings, usually by a trained person called a chick sexer or chicken sexer.[1] Chicken sexing is practised mostly by large commercial hatcheries, who have two different feeding programmes, one for the females (or hens) who are destined to lay eggs for commercial sale, and the others for the males (or roosters), most of whom will be disposed within days of their hatching because they are irrelevant to egg production. A limited number may be kept and fattened for their meat. The chicken sexer puts the chicken hatchlings on the appropriate track early, enabling those chickens to receive optimal nourishment for their likely commercial role from an early age.

Different segments of the poultry industry s*x chickens for various reasons. In factory farms that produce eggs, males are unwanted; for meat production, separate male and female lines for breeding are maintained to produce the hybrid birds that are sold for the table, and chicks of the wrong s*x in either line are unwanted. Chicks of an unwanted s*x are killed almost immediately to reduce costs to the breeders.

[edit] Methods of chick sexing

There are two chief methods of sexing chicks: feather sexing and vent sexing.

[edit] Feather sexing

Main article: s*x link

Feather sexing is easy, but it requires that the chickens be specially bred to manifest their s*x in differences in the feathers as hatchlings. These are usually hybrids, rather than breeds, and are called s*x linked chickens. Male chickens in these breeds have longer wing pinfeathers than the females do, which makes them relatively easy to tell apart. Most chickens do not have these traits bred into them, and the hatchlings are identical to all but the skilled eye of the professional chicken sexer.

[edit] Vent sexing

Vent sexing, also known simply as venting, involves literally squeezing the f***s out of the chick, which opens up the chicks anal vent (called a cloaca) slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small "bump", which would indicate that the chick is a male. Some females have very small bumps, but rarely do they have the large bumps male chicks possess.

The sexual organs of birds are located within the body; the professional vent sexer has studied their external appearance, which can fall into as many as fifteen basic patterns, and learned to identify which ones are male and which female. Many professional vent sexers are Japanese, where the method originated. A seminal paper about vent sexing was published in Japan in 1933 by Professors Masui and Hashimoto, which was soon translated into English under the title Sexing baby chicks. After Masui and Hashimoto's discovery, interested poultry breeders brought in people who had been trained by them to teach the technique, or sent representatives to Japan to learn it.

[edit] Alternative methods

Small poultry farmers whose operations are not of sufficient size to warrant hiring a chicken sexer must wait until the hatchlings are four to six weeks old before learning the sexes of their chickens. At that time their secondary s*x characteristics begin to appear, making it possible for anyone with a minimal amount of training to s*x a chicken.

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In my school, we do feather sexing:do it before they are 4 days ols, its really easy.

http://animalsciences.missouri.edu/repro...

Look in this website it tell you. GOOD LUCK

Answer 3

You can "s*x" (determine the s*x) of day-old chicks by examining what they've got going on below the waste. It takes a magnifying glass and an experienced "sexer" to determine gender, otherwise it's nearly impossible.

Now, there are certain breeds of chickens called "sexlinks" which you can tell their gender simply by the color of their feathers.