More baby chickies

I mentioned a while ago that someone gave us some fertilised eggs. We put some of them under a broody hen and others in to the incubator. In the end only 5 hatched and sadly one of the little chicks died so we have 4 little chicks with the broody hen now. Two hatched in the incubator and 3 under the chicken. The chicken accepts additional chicks fine as the eggs are hatching, but we found last time if we tried to give her more later on she wouldn't take them in and kept shooing them away from the ones she already had.

The original chicks are about 15 weeks old and are pretty big now. We can tell hens from roosters (we hope!) and have sold two hens to a neighbor who lost some to foxes recently. We are probably going to sell one more, leaving us with 3 hens and 6 roosters. We plan on keeping one rooster and eating the other five - when they are a bit bigger.

Chicken on left, rooster on right

The roosters combs go red earlier, they have thicker legs and their feathers on their back and neck are pointier than the hens. Often the tails are curved over and the hens are straight but this doesn't seem to be exclusively the case at this age.

This is the rooster we plan on keeping

Of these 12 chickens 2 were brought up by the broody hen and the other 10 by us. Initially the 10 grew faster as they managed to eat more with it there in a little dish for them all the time but later the 2 outside with the chicken grew faster, we suppose because there were able to free range with the flock and eat more. This guy is one of the outside ones. He has nice markings and is starting to show an interest in the older hens - as well as starting to crow a little.