How To Tell if Your Chicken is a Rooster

we got 13 baby chicks about two months ago since then we built them a chicken coop and now they're outside living in their chicken run but we're starting to wonder if we made a giant mistake [Music] when we bought our chickens we bought five different breeds and we bought all pullets and right now we have concerns that we might have up to three roosters there's one that we're mainly concerned about and that is this americana that chicken looks very different than all the other chickens its behavior its tail feathers waddle comb all look very different than the other chickens it's hard to do a fair comparison because we only have two americanas the rest are other breeds so it could just be a matter of that breed looks a little bit different as the chickens start to get older you get some visual clues into whether or not you have a hand or a rooster one of those being the comb and the wattle the comb is the part on the top of the head and the waddle is the piece that sits down below their jaw now both hens and roosters can have combs and waddles but typically on roosters it's much more pronounced now we're starting to see some combs and waddles really only on a few chickens [Music] now on two to three of our chickens they have the really pronounced tail where they stick pretty high up in the air it's also referred to as the sickle now as the chickens get older and when a rooster would actually develop into a rooster that sickle becomes much more pronounced it kind of arcs up and folds down and it's pretty obvious when you have a rooster so right now our chickens are kind of in that teenager stage they're about 10 weeks old so it's still a bit too early to tell they're obviously not crowing yet that can take four to five months before that begins so right now all we have are these visual clues now the chicken in question appears to be slightly bigger than the others are they bigger because they're a rooster or are they bigger because they're a different breed or perhaps they're just a week or two older than some of the other chickens another indicator that you might have a rooster is behavior when it comes to food he will typically go out and look for food and call to the other chickens or the hens to let them know hey i have found food another indicator is behavior so there's a pecking order when it comes to chickens and roosters typically sit at the top of that pecking order one of the chickens that we have concerns that it may be a rooster is the first one to come out of the chicken coop every morning [Music] so we bought all of our baby chicks from a local farm store and they were all labeled as pullets now i know there's always a risk that they could have been sexed incorrectly and you can accidentally get a rooster but i don't know how common this is so let me know leave me a comment have you ever gone out and bought just pullets and ended up with a rooster and what did you do about it [Music] and we based our coop build on having a maximum of 20 chickens we'd prefer to have less than that as it's only a 4x8 coupe and we don't want to overcrowd them so we figured worst case scenario we could have up to two roosters and the rest be hens best case scenario one of these pullets actually ends up being a rooster but we only want one if we end up with more than one rooster it's going to kind of throw everything out of balance and we're really going to have to pay attention to behavior to make sure that we don't have any fighting between the two roosters because there aren't enough hens to go around now in the coming weeks we should get a real easy answer to this question because if we hear some crowing outside obviously we have a rooster the only question will be do we have one rooster or do we have multiples and another problem to solve on the homestead we'll keep you updated over the next few weeks in the meantime watch this video next to learn more about our backyard chickens and remember to live free and find your purpose [Music]

Channel: Aprons & Overalls

Views: 12,633

Keywords: Maple Hill Homestead, Homesteading, New homestead, New farmers, Young homestead family, Homestead daily vlog, Homestead vlog, Backyard chickens, Young family homestead, Identifying roosters, How to identify roosters, Determining chicken sex, Chicken sexing, Rooster traits, How to know you have a cockerel, Cockerel vs pullet, Sexing teenage chickens, Male chicken traits, Female chicken traits, backyard chickens, ameraucana, Indiana Homestead, Do I have a rooster, homestead

Id: X6SiL837WHg

Length: 5min 14sec (314 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022