Marking eggs to track hatchling.

[ManOverBoard]

Be ready for roosters, learn to identify the sexes, I hatched 12 of them, I got two hens

Oh man, we had a batch like that two runs ago. 11 roosters 3 hens

 

[Ridgerunner]

I hatch about 90 chicks over a 2-year span. The average of boys to girls is real close to 50-50. But most individual hatches are closer to 2/3 or 3/4 for one sex or the other. Odds are odds and they work. Someone has to get these really weird ones. My worst was 7 pullets out of 7 eggs. I wanted a couple of boys but no luck.

 

[ChookaPete]

Where do you buy fertile eggs from that ship to your door?

I got a dozen mixed heritage breed fertile eggs from a chicken breeder named Wendy who lives in Kambalda, Western Australia. The eggs were driven rather than shipped to my front gate, where I paid cash on delivery.


Sadly none of the fertile eggs hatched - but that was an incubator issue.



I later bought three Light Sussex pullets from her, but instead I drove to her front door to pay and collect them. Happily, they are settling in fine, though seem a bit cautious to go further into the yard from the coop.

 

[ChookaPete]

In chickens, males have sex chromosomes ZZ. Females have sex chromosomes ZW. That means the hen determines the sex of the chick by whether she gives a Z or a W chromosome. The rooster gives a Z to all of them.

That is useful if you want to breed sexlink chicks:

You use a rooster with a recessive trait on the Z chromsome. Because it's recessive, he only shows the trait if he has it on both Z chromsomes, so you can tell he has the right genes just by looking at him. And you use a hen with the dominant trait on her Z chromosome (but nothing on her W chromsome.) Because she's got just one Z chromosome, you know she cannot be carrying a recessive trait, so just like the rooster, you can tell by looking that the hen has the right genes.

When you cross such a rooster and hen, the rooster gives a Z chromsome with the recessive trait to all his chicks. The hen gives the dominant trait to her sons, which they show because it is dominant. The hen gives a W chromsome to her daughters, so they show the recessive trait they inherited from their father. This means the male chicks and female chicks can be sorted by sex, just by sorting the different colors.

Common sex-linked traits include:
gold (recessive) and silver (dominant)
chocolate (recessive) and not-chocolate (dominant)
not-barred (recessive) and barred (dominant)

The barring gene can also be used to make auto-sexing chicken breeds, because it shows a dose effect. A hen with just one Z chromosome will have just one barring gene. That makes white bars on her feathers. A rooster with two Z chromosomes can have two barring genes. That makes more white in the barring of his feathers, and makes the chick down a lighter color as well. Cream Legbars and Bielefelders are known for being sexable this way, and it also works on Barred Rocks, Cuckoo Marans, and some other breeds. Sometimes there are confusing chicks (female a bit lighter than normal? male a bit darker than normal?), but breeding from just the most obvious chicks will generally cause future generations to be easier to sex.



I dont know if Aristotle said it too, but Pliny the Elder definitely did in the first century.
The work is Natural History, Volume 2, Book 10, Chapter 74 "The various kinds of eggs, and their nature." You can find an English translation here on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60230


Mesh bags or baskets, plus legbands or food coloring, works.
Or using several incubators and several brooders.

Thanks very much for this information! I know it is just upper secondary high school level genetics, but I admit I am a novice on this stuff, so every bit helps.

 

[ManOverBoard]

I hatch about 90 chicks over a 2-year span. The average of boys to girls is real close to 50-50. But most individual hatches are closer to 2/3 or 3/4 for one sex or the other. Odds are odds and they work. Someone has to get these really weird ones. My worst was 7 pullets out of 7 eggs. I wanted a couple of boys but no luck.

It seems to trend the way we don't want, roos when we want hens, hens when we want roos, but you're right about the odds. It's so great when they actually hatch each time either way.

 

[lpatelski]

How many combinations:
4 colors = 4 chicks
4 colors, 2 legs = 16 chicks
4 colors, 2 per leg, 2 legs is either 64 or 256 chicks depending on whether you keep track of which band is above/below the other on each leg (is yellow/pink different than pink/yellow?)

If you use three or more bands per leg, you can do more, but that gets to be a lot to keep track of.

If you have multiple colors of chicks, you can use chick color as well as band color and placement: black chick with a green legband, white chick with a green legband, brown chick with a green left legband, brown chick with a green right legband...

If there is just one chick that matters, and it is the same color as the other chicks, you can assign a color and put bands on both of its legs. Then if one band falls off, you recognize the chick by the other band, and replace the missing band. Or mark the special chick with one color, and all other same-color chicks with a different color of band. That also lets you recognize the chick if one band goes missing (its own or one of the others), so you can re-band whoever lost one.

I use zip ties and

Cable Wire Markers. I also memorized the colors because I couldn't see the numbers sometimes. Blue chick was 344

 

[ManOverBoard]

I use zip ties and View attachment 4072508Cable Wire Markers. I also memorized the colors because I couldn't see the numbers sometimes. Blue chick was 344

Do you keep removing/ replacing the zip the as it grows? We use zip ties and colored beads on our big girls. We ran out of charm options. Although the charms made it easy to recognize each one.

 

[lpatelski]

Do you keep removing/ replacing the zip the as it grows? We use zip ties and colored beads on our big girls. We ran out of charm options. Although the charms made it easy to recognize each one.

Yes, I weigh my chicks frequently. I change them most frequently on the younger birds. At some point you have decided what you will do with them. Freezer camp or keeper. I have accurate records due to my ability to track individuals.

 

[NatJ]

I use zip ties and View attachment 4072508Cable Wire Markers. I also memorized the colors because I couldn't see the numbers sometimes. Blue chick was 344

Nice! Yes, those would give a nice increase to how many you can mark!

Thanks very much for this information! I know it is just upper secondary high school level genetics, but I admit I am a novice on this stuff, so every bit helps.

I don't know what level it actually is, but I never got it in school. I even read a book that told how to make sexlinks (cross a rooster from list A with a hen from list B) but it didn't mention the genes involved or that the sex chromosomes are different in birds than in humans. So when I finally learned the reasons for how sexlinks work, it felt like an enormous discovery!

 

[Gategitter]

Tiny silly question…. Numbers are hard hahaha. You said you ordered medium 3/8. Not finding 3/8.. did I read it wrong ??? Sorry for silly question