Poultry Talk Ontario (pto.ca)

Roosters vs hens when hatching, I have come to accept the fact that roosters will almost always out number hens when hatching, to the point I don't even count anymore. It's kind of sad however when you have one third hens and two thirds roosters and you think you had a good year lol. I counted how many hens I will have over winter, 14, not a bad number since they are all small. The thing that got me is I still have 9 roosters. One I picked to stay, probably another two will be spared but the rest will be named Stew lol. Nine roosters still, that's still after putting down dozens of chicks that were clearly roosters at six weeks, after giving away roosters to my neighbour who likes to free range them, after countless auctions where I sent boxes and boxes and boxes of young roosters, after butchering three different groups of roosters, after selling some roosters to people who want breeders and also some I put down because they seemed "off" or were not growing properly or kicked the bucket on their own. That's beyond annoying, imagine if I had that many hen chicks. I did have some pullets to sell but not near the rooster numbers.

Aye, current research says its something about temperature (at egg lay or while in the incubator) and there's lots of money being thrown at this for chickens as well as other animals.

After my experience of having my eggs hatched by Millpond hatchery where the split was 12 to 13
cockerels to pullets and 10 to 14 cockerels to pullets, it only reenforce my feeling that in small home incubators the stronger survive so the split tends to favor cockerels.
In my home hatches when the hatch rate was 95% it was still pretty even, lover the hatch rate larger cockerel ratio.
That's just my theory based on my personal experience. :)

Ontario Chick wrote: ↑

Sun Nov 05, 2017 11:38 am

After my experience of having my eggs hatched by Millpond hatchery where the split was 12 to 13
cockerels to pullets and 10 to 14 cockerels to pullets, it only reenforce my feeling that in small home incubators the stronger survive so the split tends to favor cockerels.
In my home hatches when the hatch rate was 95% it was still pretty even, lover the hatch rate larger cockerel ratio.
That's just my theory based on my personal experience. :)

OC i have wondered that myself, take for example my Welsummer eggs, eleven chicks made it to the end but failed to hatch. I wonder how many of them were hen chicks. I also noticed when I hatched black sex-link chicks, the chicks with the white spot (males) were stronger than the black chicks (females) generally. Maybe nature did this since males are flashy and bigger targets in the wild.

I guess I was really "lucky" with what came out of my Welsummer disaster hatch this summer: two out of seven hatched out, both females. I actually expected them both to be males, given the way the whole misadventure had gone.

I lucked out with my only hatch with a Broody this year- 100% female....only one chick hatched and it’s a pullet!
Most of the eggs were a stinky mess so not sure how this one survived but she was the tough one!

Brebis wrote: ↑

Sun Nov 05, 2017 12:33 pm

I lucked out with my only hatch with a Broody this year- 100% female....only one chick hatched and it’s a pullet!
Most of the eggs were a stinky mess so not sure how this one survived but she was the tough one!

Same here, one lonely female (but I need a male), I think it only proves that once the females are given a chance, they are the stronger sex. Just saying.

I don't incubate, only broodies, and not exact every time, but pretty well 50-50. I still hate having to deal with the cockerels.

the trick to getting more girls is to desperately need a male to replace an ailing rooster.
then you will get girls and no boys, and be totally out of luck for the next year when your rooster is finally shooting blanks and you cannot find another rooster of the quality you want......

Early incubator hatches this year most definitely favoured males. Only 1 in 4 are pullets from first hatch, and it was also my only hatch that went really well . None of the hens went broody before July, so I can't compare the two sets of information, but as the season went on, successive incubator hatches moved towards a balance even though humidity was awful all season and I had countless drowned chicks. Last hatch (September) netted three boys, seven girls and one ?? so probably boy.
Once the hens started hatching, things followed a similar progression--large % boys at first and then swinging the other way. One hen is still (mostly) toting around twelve chicks, had a look at them last night, and only two are definitely male, and two maybes, leaving at least 66% pullets.
This tends to coincide with previous years, where March-June produced mostly males and August-November mostly females. I don't hatch in other months often enough to compare, and I'm not OCD, er, anal, er, curious enough to chart temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure etc. while banging out hundreds of cockerels to see if there's a link somewhere, anywhere. But I'd definitely like to know if my experience is unique, just wishful thinking/bad records keeping, or if anyone else has noted similar seasonal trends.

Also as a point of note, here, once grow-outs are out free-ranging, predators pick off pullets first. As a general rule, they are less observant and alert than cockerels. Boys watch for danger and girls watch for crickets...so if I were to undertake such a data collection experiment, I would have to be able to reliably sex chicks at hatch to get accurate numbers.