Instructions
Vent sexing
Hold the baby chick in your hand. With your dominant hand, use your thumb and forefinger to gently squeeze the chick's anus, which is located under its tail. This will open the anus.
Look inside the anus. If you see a genital organ -- it looks like a small pustule -- your chick is male. If the genital organ is absent, the chick is female.
Continue the process until you have vented all of the chicks. Separate the males from the females after sexing.
Feather sexing
Ensure that feather sexing is possible before sexing your chicks in this way. This method is only possible with specific chick strains.
Study the chick's feathers. If the wing feathers are distinctly different sizes, the chick is female. The size of a male chick's wing feathers do not vary.
Separate male and female chicks after feather sexing.
How to Determine Male & Female Chicks
Sexing, the process of determining the sex of newly hatched chicks, can be done in many ways. Vent sexing identifies genitalia on newborn chicks. This is difficult, as genitalia is not fully developed until months after a chick has hatched. Feather sexing is done by studying the feather characteristics of a chick. The easiest means of sexing is to wait until the chicks are old enough to have fully developed genitalia.