HOW TO SEX DAY-OLD CHICKS

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Although J. Mulder and O. Wollan (see MOTHER NO. 25) swear that they raised 23 pullets from 23 eggs by comparing the shape of their hen fruit (according to them, eggs that eventually hatch into pullets are more oval than the pointy eggs that eventually hatch out as cockerels) . . . other chicken raisers disagree-sometimes most emphatically—with this bit of barnyard wisdom.

"The fact is," says Veronica Waters (of Wellton, Arizona), "that one hen will lay an egg of almost identical shape every day. This shape also differs from one breed to another. Therefore, the egg's form cannot indicate the sex of the chick it will produce. If it did, all the layings of a particular fowl—or of a particular breed or strain—would be of one sex. Common sense, or any familiarity with chickens, will tell you that this is not so."

So there you have it: both sides of The Controversy. Some say that you can sex chickens by the shape of the eggs from which they'll hatch . . . some say you can't.

Beth Bosk, on the other hand, says, "To heck with the whole argument. The only way to really sex chickens is to let them hatch first . . . and then sort the males from the females."

There are several ways to do this picking and choosing (some are considered by professional chicken sexers to be closely guarded trade secrets) . . . and Beth has doen a sterling job of ferreting them out. As nearly as we can make out, some of the information in the following article has never appeared in print in a general interest magazine—or even a specialized trade publication—before.

THE VENT SORT

Lyle Scheline is a professional chicken sexer, an expert of 22 years' experience. On hatch days he shows up at the A & M Hatchery, rolls up his white shirt sleeves and stands at a wood table under a suspended light.

Box after box of hatchlings (some but an hour old) are brought in and placed before Lyle at waist level. Over and over he scoops up a chick with his left hand, expels its droppings with a squeeze of his thumb, opens its vent with his fingers, peers through the magnifying lenses attached to his spectacles and determines its sex. Then he deposits the tiny bird in one of two bins. Two thousand vent sexes and a good day's work later, his hands and his shirt front are still immaculate. And if you buy sexed chicks from Lyle's employer, the sort is guaranteed 95% accurate.

In slow motion, here's how Scheline separates those chicks.

There are three cardboard boxes on the table: one in front of Lyle (full of unsorted hatchlings) and the pullet and cockerel bins to right and left. Each container is divided into four compartments to buffer the shock of long-distance travel when the young birds are shipped the next day. A milk carton, its top removed and two adjoining sides cut down halfway, stands behind the "unsorted" container with the low sides angled to face front.