Author: Anna & Mark

Although everybody can tell a
hen from a rooster when they’re fully grown, it can be difficult to
disentangle your cockerels (male) from your pullets (female) if you’re
raising straight run (un-sexed) chicks.  Assuming that you only
have space in your flock for one rooster, the sooner you identify the
other males, the better.  Broilers (up to about two months old)
are the tenderest and tastiest, roasters (3 to 5 months old) are good
but need to be cooked slowly, and any chicken older than five months is
very tough unless you stew it down or grind it into sausage.  Even
if you can’t handle the thought of killing and eating your own
chickens, it will be much easier to find roosters a home while they are
still in the broiler or roaster stage than if you wait until the fall
when they’re old and tough.



So what kinds of clues can
you use to identify your rooster at a young age?  Folk lore
suggests that if you hold chicks upside-down by their feet, the males
will fight harder than the females, but that sounds not only cruel but
also unscientific.  A more accurate method can be achieved by
mating barred females (black and white striped feathers) with
non-barred males — the offspring will have barred feathers if they’re
male but not if they’re female.  Other types of sex-linked
chickens will have other color patterns, but will be similarly distinct
between the hens and the roosters.  Or you can sex your chicks the
way the pros do by peering at their vents, but this is no task for an
amateur.



The best way to sex chickens,
in my opinion, is to watch your birds mature in their second month of
life.  The males will nearly always start showing a comb before
the females and will already be larger — this is much easier to tell
if you have multiple chicks of the same breed and age to compare. 
You can be positive your chicken is a rooster when he begins to crow,
at which point he’ll start to grow into his manliness and will prompt
frosty morning photo shoots to capture his beauty.  Look for a
comb that continues to grow much larger than a hen’s and an
extra-toe-like spur on the back of each foot.  His neck and tail
feathers will change from rounded hen-like feathers to long, narrow,
shiny feathers.  I find it useful to peer at adult roosters, where
the differences are much more distinct, so that I’ll be more adept at
chick sexing when the next brood comes along in the spring.

Chicken feathers lining the
ground don’t necessarily mean that a fox got one of your hens. 
Chances are, you’re just seeing the most obvious sign of the annual
molt.



Chickens start molting
when they’re about 18 months old, usually in late summer or early fall,
but some birds will molt in the spring.  In addition to seeing
feathers all over the ground, you’ll notice that your chickens look
bedraggled during the molt and have stray feathers sticking out in all
directions.  Old feathers are being dropped while new feathers
slowly grow back to take their place, a process that is repeated
annually, usually at around the same time of year.  Different
varieties and ages of chickens will molt at different times, though, so
you may see one chicken molting in your flock while the others are
happily going about their daily business.



Unfortunately for the
chicken-keeper, molting chickens tend to slow down laying or perhaps
stop egg production entirely for the entire two to four months that
they are regrowing feathers.  Looking at it from the hen’s point
of view, the egg-laying break makes sense — it costs a lot of energy
to make feathers and to make eggs, and it’s just too much to do both at
once.  This is the one place that our cochin really shines — although
she’s not a very good layer, she does tend to molt much earlier in the
fall than our Golden Comets, so we continue to have a
few eggs to cook with during the main flock’s molt.



Although chickens will
naturally end their molt and ramp up egg production again on their own
schedule, you can help them out a bit by boosting their protein rations
when you start to see feathers lining the coop floor.  Some
chicken keepers add cat food, meat, eggs, or yogurt to their feed
during the molt while others simply switch their flock over to the higher
protein chick starter feed (with the addition of oyster shells to
provide the calcium missing from this alternative diet.)  Digging
up some worms and grubs might be the most natural way to keep your
flock in prime condition during the molt.