Chicken FAQ: How to Magically Select Pullet Chicks at the Feed Store

Sure, you want to buy baby chicks this year, but what if you only want pullet (girl) chicks? None of those crowing roosters that don’t lay any eggs? If so, you’re like a lot of people. Corvallis, for example, has an ordinance forbidding roosters in town, but hens are okay.

The problem is that the feed stores normally offer only straight-run chicks. That is, boys and girls together. What to do?

What not to do is learning “chick sexing” the way the professionals do it, which is difficult and disgusting. See this video from Dirty Jobs if you don’t believe me!

Back to the Feed Store

Well, that was fun, but what does it have to do with do-it-yourself chick sexing at the feed store? Nothing (sorry). Chick sexing the way the pros do it takes a lot of practice.  But never mind, we have two easy methods, depending on breed.

Chipmunk Stripes = Pullet Chicks

If the store has these breeds, we’re in business:

    • Rhode Island Reds
    • New Hampshire Reds
    • Production Reds

All these breeds have something in common: The chicks with chipmunk stripes on their backs are females! Well, maybe not all, but at least 95%. And if you pick only the ones with well-defined chipmunk strips, it’s more like 100%.

Most people don’t know this, so the chicks aren’t likely to have been picked over by other customers. Just make the feed store clerk pick out the ones with the racing stripes because “they’re pretty,” and don’t take no for an answer. Voila! Sexed chicks at straight-run prices!

(People have asked me, “What do you mean, ‘chipmunk stripes’?” You’ll know ’em when you see ’em. Most of the chicks won’t have any stripes down their backs at all. On some, the stripes on their backs will be faint, and others, they’ll be clear. Get the ones with the most clearly defined stripes.

In short:

    • Definite chipmunk stripes: Girl chicks at least 95% of the time.
    • Faint or unconvincing or no chipmunk stripes: Could be boy or girl chicks.

White Head Spots = Male Chicks

This method works for Barred Rocks (only). With these, the cockerels tend to have big, solid white spots on the tops of their heads, and yellow feet. Pullets tend to have smaller, more uneven spots and dark feet. Select the most pullet-y of the chicks and you won’t go wrong.

In short:

    • Definite round white head spot: Boy chicks.
    • Faint, splotchy, funny-shaped, or missing white head spot: Girl chicks.

Plenty More Tips Where Those Came From

Success With Baby Chicks.

And if you think that’s clever, you ain’t seen nothing yet. It’s one of the least useful facts in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. Just by reading this book, you become a chick-rearing expert. Imagine how much more pleasure you’ll get when you’re completely successful every time.

I read hundreds of poultry books, extension bulletins, research papers, and magazine articles when researching this book, stretching from 100 years ago to the present day. I discovered many useful facts and techniques that have been forgotten, like the chipmunk-stripe trick. And it’s all been reduced to 155 clear and straightforward pages. You will reap the rewards of my years of work in a couple of hours!

Buy the book before you get your chicks, so you know what to do, not what you should have done.

Can Eggs Help You Lose Weight?

While this story about eggs and weight loss isn’t new, it was news to me! Basically, one group of overweight people were given egg breakfasts and another bagel and cream cheese breakfasts with equal numbers of calories, and the egg-eaters ate less during the rest of the day, felt less hungry, lost more weight, and had more energy!

“Where can I sign up?” you ask. Well, you could do a lot worse than to throw out your cereal and bagels and eat a more traditional breakfast. Grass-fed eggs, for preference. The concept seems to be that protein satisfies your hunger longer, while carbohydrates set you up for renewed cravings a short time after eating.

The Atkins Diet, Grass-Fed Goodness, and Me

High-protein breakfasts (and lunches and dinners) have worked for me, too. I’ve lost 45 pounds [Update, March 5 — Make that fifty pounds!] on the Atkins Diet, which I started a couple of years ago, and it certainly reduced my appetite. I enjoyed food as much as ever, but I ate less of it. Grass-fed eggs, pastured pork, and grass-fed chicken that we raise right here on the farm have been a big factor in my success. My only regret is that no one has bred a pig 50 feet long so it has enough bacon! We always run out of bacon first, and you just can’t buy bacon like we get from our own pigs.

Another thing that helps me is to weigh myself every day and put a dot on a weight-loss chart. This give me daily feedback about my progress. If I start backsliding, I see it and start managing my eating more strictly.

I recommend a digital scale for this — they’re very affordable these days, and they’re a lot more accurate than the old spring-type models. It’s best to buy tools you can trust!

The Most Important Thing is Not to Quit

Probably the most important thing is to make a firm decision that you’re never, ever going to give up. You’re going to keep working on weight loss, one way or another. Your tactics may change, but the goal will remain constant. If you fall off your diet, that’s okay — it doesn’t mean a thing. We all mess up sometimes, and that means that the occasional failure is normal, expected, meaningless. But you’re going to get right back on the diet again.

You can switch diets, too, if you get stuck or get tired of the current one. You can do anything you want, except giving up!

How I Used Self-Hypnosis to Get Unstuck

I’m still not at my goal, and I’ve stalled a couple of times. I got stuck after losing 20 pounds, but used a self-hypnosis recording to get me unstuck and lose another 25 pounds. I was impressed!

I don’t know what you think about hypnosis, but you can’t argue with success, can you? Oh, wait, of course you can — but you won’t, because you’re too considerate. Science has caught up with hypnosis over the past couple of decades, and it’s lot less mysterious than it used to be. This is reflected in the format of self-hypnosis programs that you can buy on the Web. They tend to start with a calm discussion of the problem and its solution (say, weight loss), then walk you through some progressive relaxation to hopefully get you in a receptive state of mind, then they restate the solution again in a somewhat different way, often using anecdotes or metaphors in addition to making obvious suggestions like, “You’re going to get slimmer because that’s how you want to be.”

I’m fond of the products from Hypnosis Downloads.com, which has a huge selection of downloads. Also, they’re use less gimmickry than anybody. No echo chambers, no new-age music — they’re more straightforward and workmanlike than anybody else I’ve run into. Not to mention that their prices are reasonable and they have steep volume discounts if you buy more than one program.

I’m also talking a long walk every day and doing my farm chores, but I’ve done all those things for ages and they’ve never caused me to lose weight. The Atkins Diet and the self-hypnosis are what have worked for me. Two years so far, and no backsliding, though I’m still not where I want to be.

But eating eggs for breakfast is a good start!

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Mother Earth Loves Me

Mother Earth News has picked up another of my blog postings to carry on their site: Brooding Chicks in Winter. I must say that I admire their taste!

Everyone knows that the brooding period is by far the most critical time of a chicken’s life. And it’s important that they do more than stay alive — they have to thrive, or they’ll have problems later in life.

Imagine how heartbreaking it is to not only have baby chicks die during the brooding period, but for the survivors to do poorly later on. Or, even worse, for children to have this experience. I wrote my book, Success With Baby Chicks, so that imagining this heartbreak is as close as you’ll ever get. What you’ll experience is success, with frisky chickens living the happy chicken life and all the good feelings and enjoyment that this will bring.

I do this in a clear, easy-to-follow, unpadded 150-page book. Major publishers think that consumers want bulk, and pad out their books with filler, but I respect your time and stick to the point — ensuring your success and enjoyment. Because you’re sitting at your computer right now and reading my chicken-oriented blog, you know that the book is a good match for you — and you want to read it before you get your first chicks of the season, so you’ll be ready.

You want it on your reference shelf, too. I reread the book from time to time myself, since I sometimes forget the fine points and need to refresh my memory.

And then that faint feeling of dread that some people feel when they order baby chicks — will they be all right? — will be replaced with well-founded confidence. Or so my fan mail claims. So order your copy today — it can’t help you until you read it.


Got Windows 7 Installed, Finally

I upgraded my desktop PC to Windows 7, which I’m very happy with, but it gave me more grief than it should have. I’ve owned computers since 1980, when I got my first Apple II, and I’m a bona fide computer wizard, so it should have been easy, right?

Well, not quite. The first hurdle was dealing with Windows 7’s insistence on wiping out your “Documents and Settings” — the only indispensable things on most PCs! Do you have any idea how much data I’ve accumulated over the years? Messing around with backing it up and restoring it was Not Fun. It was just as hard as if I were transferring my stuff to a brand-new computer, which I wasn’t.

The other hurdle was with mirrored drives. The more spendy versions of Windows 7 allow you to do disk mirroring, so all your data lives on two drives simultaneously. If one dies, the other keeps going, and you can slap in a replacement drive and get back to mirroring. No prob. And it doubles the speed of disk reads, which is nothing to sneeze at. (Disk mirroring is also called “RAID 1.” Don’t ask.)

But it’s amazingly difficult to figure out how to set it up. Why, Microsoft, didn’t you provide step-by-step instructions?

Some motherboards have the same capability in hardware, but they, too are always incredibly ill-documented.

But I’m up and running again, and Windows 7 seems quite a bit snappier than XP, though it seems to have some teething troubles, with the occasional odd bit of behavior.

A while back I bought a bargain-basement computer for under $300 at Staples to use as a secondary computer, and even el cheapo machines are pretty usable these days. So you might want to do it the easy way and get a new computer when you decide to switch to Windows 7. That’s called a “forklift upgrade” in the biz.