From Maison de Poulet…. Sexing Chicks (NO this is NOT an X-rated post!)

I tried something kinda cool last night.

I’m not sure of the sex of some of these baby chicks I got and it’s frustrating since I’m not keeping any males, I don’t want to get too attached to them. I read in a book about chickens that you can tell by the same principle that they use when they witch for water. The pioneers used this method to tell what the sex was if a woman was going to have a baby...or to sex chicks, or any other critter. Well, hey! They didn’t have sonograms back then! They even used a suspended ring on eggs so they could only hatch the females since food was usually in short supply. They didn’t want to waste any eggs on hatching a bunch of roosters they didn’t need.

Anyway, you suspend a gold ring over the chick on a long piece of hair or a chain, hold your hand really still and the ring will begin to swing… if the ring swings straight back and forth, it’s a male…if it swings around in a circle it’s a female. They say it’s 90% accurate! That’s pretty amazing. I not only tried it on all my chicks, but I tried it on myself, Andy and Rosie! It was right on all of us. It also went along with all the other sexing methods I have used on these chicks.
There was another method I tried too. It concerns a chick’s natural behavior. If you fling a hat over the top of the heads of chicks, the males will stand tall and chirp…the females will hunker down and get really quiet. After separating my chicks from this hat test, I tried the ring thing and both tests agreed 90% on the sex of every chick. I was wrong about one of them…it was a female instead of a male like I thought! Now I’ll wait a while and see for sure when they mature a bit.

I feel like Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies! Now where’s my rumatiz medicine??