Chicks? Not Really

Our little chicks are now four and a half weeks old and they are still growing exponentially.  Really they hardly look like the cute little fuzzy peeps that we started with on January 9th.

Last week I met with the Ag agent for our county who showed me how to determine the hens from the roosters and 25 minutes more of details.

The roosters are red along the 'ear' and have a pronounced comb and wattle, both of which on this breed of chicken are red.

And they have fewer feathers on their rear...

I'm sure you appreciate tuning in here for pictures of chicken butts.

The hens, not surprisingly, are more pink on the head comb and wattle.

I thought about applying some of my Skinceutical cream to her wattle, but I think it was too late and I'm too busy using it in a similar area on my neck to prevent my own wattle.

If you'd also like to know the roosters have more pointed feathers on their back where the hens are more rounded in the rear.  Yes, I see the similarities between women and hens, thank you for thinking of the obvious.

Our 22 chicks/chickens are split between 12 roosters and 10 hens.  I don't know if it was random selection that gave us an almost 50/50 split on gender or if that was planned by the hatchery.

We will be showing 3 of the hens in the stock show in March the others can be converted to layers with a change in their diet.  When we switch them to Medifast type diet they should slim down and be less chest-y and more about egg production when they reach chicken puberty.

Of course this breed isn't the best of layers, but are likely to produce double yolked eggs and about 100 eggs each in a year.  Assuming of course that the neighborhood gang members don't get them in the mean time. There was one circling on Saturday.

You can't see the hawk in this picture, but he was out there circling, and close enough that I thought I could take his picture.

To address the remaining portion of our birds, the roosters can be separated from the hens and given a diet of 100% cracked corn for about two weeks and then they can be 'processed' for the freezer. Regardless of the time or the temperature, I've got Jimmy cracking in the shed right now.