How to Sex Baby Chickens

By Beth Robinson Bosk
Updated on February 13, 2023
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by Adobestock/Ekaterina Bag

Depending on the breed of your chicks, there are four ways to separate cockerels from pullets; learn how to sex baby chickens.

Although J. Mulder and O. Wollan (January/February 1974) 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.

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