Rooster Or Hen? Early Signs It's A Rooster

[Music] hi there and welcome to today's video about how to raise baby chicks my name is Matt mantei dirt and I will be here with you every day for the next 16 weeks showing you how I raise baby chicks and day-olds into the healthy layer I'm also the founder of the website we have a sugar mama and we have a line of layer feeds and herbal treats for backyard chickens and chick starter which is the inspiration for this video series so it's not a really great question to talk about today is how at what age can you tell if a chick is a rooster or a hat we talk to the super video about how to tell like the physical characteristics that can show you whether your chicken is a rooster or a hen but we didn't actually talk about what age exactly you can start telling if a chicken is a rooster and it's a question that I get pretty frequently so I thought that this would be a really good opportunity to answer that question now in my opinion and there's gonna be different opinions on this and it's always gonna be chickens that are kind of in Toronto nests that make it very difficult to tell and a lot of the emails I get are you know is this a chicken or rooster and it can be pretty hard to tell at certain ages but there are certain things that you can look for pretty early on even as early as you have three days old so we talked in another video about feather sexing and that is when the pullets of a young female chicken her feathers grow faster than them then the male chickens but there's other things you can look for for example around day three you know the the the baby chicks is sort of oriented themselves into the world they're a little more confident than they were the previous two days and you can start to tell you a little bit by behavior so you might notice some chicks will fight more than others and fight being like you know rush onto other chicks kind of flap their wings a little bit nothing overly dramatic but you might notice that some will do that also I've noticed and this is just my opinion based on having raised thousands of chicks at this point yoga roosters are more likely to look you in the eye than younger poets and I think that's a little bit of an evolutionary thing like roosters are have evolved to protect their flocks and so they're evolving more aggressive a little bit more wary of their surroundings and that's not to say that pens aren't but I just notice with roosters the chicks that develop into roosters they tend to look me more in the eye at a younger age than the pullets do again this is not a universal thing but we're on day three I kind of start to look for that so another thing you can look for is how quickly the comb is developing and this will be largely based on greed for example chicks with like the rose comb they're you know they're comb will not develop as quickly as ones with a straight comb like a single comb right so it is a little bit pre dependent but it's a pretty good indicator for example if a chicken develops very pronounced waddles in a very red comb starting over a week four you know you may be a little bit earlier you probably got a rooster that the hens don't start to develop the red comb there's a large red comb in the waddles until they start laying they they stay fairly short and small until then but the Roosters you'll start to notice it develop fairly early something else you can look for and I don't personally go on this very often I'm not into the older leaf but around week 4 week six to week ten you start looking for indicators such as hackle feather saddle feathers and Tails others roosters will perch beyond a shadow of a doubt start to grow longer more obvious tail plumage than the hens will the hens tend to have a shorter stockier build and they tend a more upright build you'll notice that the versions will tend to lengthen out and I'll start to develop those long tail feathers so that's that it was starting probably about week six to week ten and then beyond week ten week four is a little early for this around week four words when I tend to use the comb and wattles so yeah that takes up to about week ten we are we tend it honestly starts to become pretty obvious although like I said there are some that are inter honest really the only way you get a 100% know if you have a hand or a rooster is when they start laying eggs yeah sometimes when they start crawling there are heads who will crow in certain situations where like for example if it's a very dominant alpha hen she might start crowing even though there's no rooster around simply because somebody's gotta protect the flock and I guess she's decided that she's gonna do it so she adopts a secondary sex characteristic of crowing it is not super common but it's not uncommon and it's definitely not unheard of I have people messaging me all the time saying my hand crowed what's going on but it can't happen but that's definitely not something I would personally go on if the chick starts crowing I say four weeks six weeks ten weeks you probably have a rooster that the hens crowing is something that only happens in sort of very specific situations it is not a common thing at all so if your young chick is starting to cry oh you're starting to see the desire to crow then you like may have a rooster so this today's video I hope you've enjoyed it if you have enjoyed today's video please go ahead and click the subscribe button and if you are watching us on YouTube please be sure to click the notification bell so that you could be notified about when we upload new videos if you have any questions about raising backyard chickens please go ahead and leave them below I'll do my best to answer please also go ahead and give us a like if you have enjoyed this video thanks for watching we'll see you next time bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Pampered Chicken Mama

Views: 87,809

Keywords: backyard chickens, raising chickens, chickens, chicken coop

Id: f1lONM57Ra4

Length: 6min 5sec (365 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 14 2019