How can you tell a baby turkey from a boy or girl?

Answer 1

If you are lucky and have a chick from a sexlink cross, that is the rooster is one color, the hen is a different color , when the eggs hatch the baby boy chicks will have a different color than the girl chicks.

If you need to find out right away after hatching, you will need to "vent check" them to look for a nearly microscopic male appendage. This is not something newbies should do, their vents are tiny and you could damage them very easily. And it is only accurate 90 percent of the time even when professionals do it.

If you can wait just a few weeks after the chicks hatch, you will notice that most of the boy chicks will have a little longer legs and bigger feet and the comb on top of their head will be just a little bigger.

As they age further there will be more changes in the feathers, the males will grow pointed saddle feathers and usually but not always prettier, shinier feathers than the hens.

Answer 2

Professionals use a method called vent sexing. They squeeze the baby chicken to make them defecate and then observe whether they have a bump inside their vent. A vent bump means its a male, no vent bump means its a female. Some females do have small bumps, so they will only guarantee a sexing accuracy of 90-95%.

Answer 3

Identifying the gender of chicks is quite a hard to do well.

Vent sexing or identifying the sex of a day old chick by looking at its sexual organs is done by well trained people. It takes a long time to learn how to identify the more than 15 different shapes of the cloaca. Chicks are often damaged or killed by squeezing them too hard when done by a novice handler. Leave this to the experts. Feather sexing is based on feather characteristics that differ between male and female chicks.The feather appearances are determined by specially selected genetic traits (sex-link) that must be present in the chick strain. Most breeds of chickens do not have these feather sexing characteristics and the feathering of both sexes appear identical. The easiest method of sexing chickens by the novice small flock owner is to care for the birds until they begin showing the natural secondary characteristics of their gender. In males, the combs and wattles will become larger than those on females and the head will become more angular and masculine looking. The female will remain smaller than the male and is more refined or feminine looking.

Answer 4

vent sexing can be done as early as in day old chicks ,it is a highly skilled procedure that can be done with a small margin of error by trained & experienced people, it is carried out in large poultry units where it is most needed as rearing practices.especially feeding ,needs to be carried out differently for each sex,so the chicks need to be separated very early on.The procedure was first started & perfected in Japan.

Stands to reasons that those of us who rear a small number of birds cannot have access to this procedure,nor do we need to know the sex so early in a chicks life ,as suggested by other answers patience is the key,soon one is able to tell the likely sex of a chick as it grows & develops characters particular to that sex,when secondary characters are seen then there is little room for doubt,these include build ,feathering,color & size of comb,last but not the least is the crow of the rooster

Answer 5

Chicken & Turkey

Some methods for sexing baby chicks that are reasonably accurate.Modern genetics and the proper breeding scheme's day old baby chicks to be sexed based upon their color. This is possible when using what is called sex-linked color traits. Mating barred hens (black and white striped feathers) with non-barred males results in barred males and nonbarred female chicks. Also birds carrying specific genes for silver and gold color patterns in the roosters and hens (silver males bred with gold females results in silver pullets and gold cockerels). With the exception of mutations, this method is always accurate.

Vent sexing baby chicks is another method popularized in the 1936 by a Japanese professor, Kiyoshi Masui. Individuals well trained at chick sexing schools can consistently and easily attain greater than 95% accuracy. This method involves holding the day old chick upside down in one hand and while visually examining the vent area for the presence or absence of a rudimentary male sex organ. There are 15 different shapes and variants of each.

This method sounds much easier than it really is. After being taught the basics of this technique from non-professionals, most people would be doing well to obtain 50% accuracy. However, if interested, information on this technique can be obtained from the Center of Excellence for Poultry Science at the University of Arkansas. Most commercial hatcheries that offer chicks for sale as either pullets or cockerels utilize this method and the poultrymen who do this well are in high demand.

The best way to sex chickens in the backyard flock is to watch them grow. As they grow, changes will become obvious as the males will begin to act manly and their voices will change from the chirp of young chicks to attempted crows. In nearly all breeds of chickens The young males' feathers will also change from the round oval-shaped feathers common to hens and young birds to the shiny, more narrow and pointed feathers found on their necks and at the base of their tails.The combs of the young roosters will begin to develop at an earlier age than they will in females. While this may vary from breed to breed and, in some breeds, might even be difficult to detect a difference; in most breeds of chickens with large combs, this is a very obvious distinction between young roosters and hens as they are maturing. This is definitely the most enjoyable method when establishing a backyard flock.

Note that this works for chicken or turkey chicks.

Answer 6

It depends on what type of bird.

Answer 7

You can't