White sikie hen barred rock cross

[farmeroakly]

I am new here and started to discuss this. This is an update of my experiment cross with photo. It is a pullet that I hand sexed the egg. Previously discussed and will prove beyound a doubt you can sex eggs by shape. It will be in a seperate post as I have photos and a lengthy explanation. So lets start by saying I only have 2 breeds. 2 white silkie hens and the rest of the flock arebarred rock unvaxed purebred 3rd generation. I have 20 barred rock hens and 1 barred rock rooster. My interest was to see what I would get crossing silkie with barred rock and I wanted 1 more silkie hen. So I set 9 eggs under my silkie hen. 1 white silkie egg and 8 barred rock brown eggs. And I purposely choose a rounded end white silkie egg to assure a pullet
More on that in other article to follow. All 9 eggs hatched. Only one had greenish black feet/ legs and was the smallest. The other 8 are pure barred rocks. Here is a photo of the pullet who had tail feathers at 8 days. She has barred rock coloring and a soft tuff featers on head and soft longer feathers like a silkie starting good at neck. I am unaware if this color cross already exists in a silkie mix? Also a photo of hen and her 9 hatched chicks.

 

[farmeroakly]

I am new here and started to discuss this. This is an update of my experiment cross with photo. It is a pullet that I hand sexed the egg. Previously discussed and will prove beyound a doubt you can sex eggs by shape. It will be in a seperate post as I have photos and a lengthy explanation. So lets start by saying I only have 2 breeds. 2 white silkie hens and the rest of the flock arebarred rock unvaxed purebred 3rd generation. I have 20 barred rock hens and 1 barred rock rooster. My interest was to see what I would get crossing silkie with barred rock and I wanted 1 more silkie hen. So I set 9 eggs under my silkie hen. 1 white silkie egg and 8 barred rock brown eggs. And I purposely choose a rounded end white silkie egg to assure a pullet
More on that in other article to follow. All 9 eggs hatched. Only one had greenish black feet/ legs and was the smallest. The other 8 are pure barred rocks. Here is a photo of the pullet who had tail feathers at 8 days. She has barred rock coloring and a soft tuff featers on head and soft longer feathers like a silkie starting good at neck. I am unaware if this color cross already exists in a silkie mix? Also a photo of hen and her 9 hatched chicks.
View attachment 3875652

Now to add to this. Egg sexing by shape. If u read all this you know this is the hen and hatch of 9. Here is what I did as told me by my father-in- law who was licensed to raise doves and quail as well as whitetail deer. He was well self educated in poultry genetics by experimentation. I did not believe it til I did exactly what he told me and got the results he said first time. Here it is: 9 eggs, 8 barred rock eggs and only 1 was pointed end the other 7 were blunt rounded end. The only white silkie egg was blunt round end as I only wamted 1 more silkie hen.in the photo above you will see all 9 hatched and these are 8 days old. Look at all nine chicks they all have tail feathers started except one to left of hen. It has yellow legs it is a barred rock and the only cockeral and All others are pullets including the black legged silkie as I wanted. Pullets get tail featers starting 7 to 10 days. Cockerals don't start getting tail featers until 8 to 10 WEEKS. I believe this does prove the shape therory. Try it yourself if you want. It made me a believer and that is how I will decide what eggs to set under a hen fro. Now on depending on weater I want pullets for layers or cokerals for meat!.

 

[Azhtann]

That is very interesting! I had never heard that you could sex the eggs by shape. I had always thought that it was temperature that helped decide the gender while developing. That is really pretty cool. I want to try that sometime when I choose to hatch eggs!

 

[NatJ]

That is very interesting! I had never heard that you could sex the eggs by shape. I had always thought that it was temperature that helped decide the gender while developing. That is really pretty cool. I want to try that sometime when I choose to hatch eggs!

Sex of birds (including chickens) is determined by what chromosome they inherit from their mother. Females are ZW, males are ZZ. So the mother gives either Z or W to each chick, which determines male vs. female.

Wikipedia has more information if you want it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system

Changing temperature is not going to change what chromosome went into the egg in the first place. Some people say that specific incubation temperatures can kill developing embryos of one sex or the other (but this does not work reliably enough to be very useful.)

The hen's body does determine the shape of the egg, and the hen does give the chromosome that makes the chick male or female. But no-one has yet been able to reliably sex eggs by shape at a large enough scale to be useful. As for which shape means male vs. female, it depends on which source you read. The Roman author Pliny the Elder, writing about two thousand years ago. said that round eggs hatch males and pointed eggs hatch females (backwards of what is being stated by the original poster of this thread.)

There is no method to accurately sex eggs before setting them, or cause them all to hatch as females. If it worked, the commercial hatcheries would be doing it. They would not be selling male chicks cheaply, and they would not be killing male chicks after hatch. There are people working on methods to deterimine the sex of a chick partway through the incubation process, so they can then kill the males at an early point (benefits: more space in the incubator after that so they can start more eggs, and no more killing of chicks that have hatched and are cute & fuzzy.)

Regarding the chicks in this particular post, I would like to see an update on their sexes now that they are older. Purebred Barred Rock chicks can usually be sexed by color: males have more white than females. I think I see 5 males in that photo of 9 chicks.

Regarding whether the one Silkie egg hatched a pullet or a cockerel: there is a 50% chance of one egg producing a pullet even if the egg-sexing method does not work. That is the same chance as a coin being heads up if you flip it once. It happens half of the time.