Maybe people new to chickens some how think that we should be able to tell a male from a female soon as we get our chicks. This though just is not the case in most kinds of chickens!

How can you tell a boy chicken from a girl chicken?

Sexing chickens can be very hard for newbies like us! In some breeds it is fairly easy like black sexlinks. They are cross breed to have little white dots on their heads when they hatch, meaning male or not meaning pullet.

Some chickens have different colored undercoats that tell if they are roosters or females.

Wing Sexing Chicks

So if you fan out a day old chicks wings you will notice two rows of tiny feathers at the end, the ones on top are the coverts and the ones on the bottom are primary. If they are about even in length, depending on breed, it could be a male. If the covert ones are longer, male. If the primary ones are short, specially by a lot, guess female! This doesn’t work on some breeds like RIR though so you really want to research your breed!

Best to do this soon after they are born and not days later because females feathers grow fast! By day 5, they might all look the same!

This is me trying to get ideas from the experts on the BYC forum on five day old chick wings:

Because I waited so long the over all opinion is “good luck with that” and asking me about over all wing and tail size compared to other chicks the same age. This brings up another good way to guess if your chicken is boy or girl! Girls feathers grow more quickly so they tand to have noticeably bigger wings and longer tails at first!

Take a look at my speckled sussix chicks at 6 weeks. You can see the tail on the left female is big, same with the black sexlink female in the back. But the Rooster on the right, tiny tail! Notice how they all have the same size comb on their head? Some female chickens get those, so don’t think that automatically means you have a rooster!

Now of course the professional way to sex a chicken is by looking at their vent but I have heard this can hurt the chick and some people still can’t figure it out so I am going with the guess and then wait and see method personally! Good Luck! I would love to see your chick photos and help guess with you!