What is straight run chickens

You have 0 items in your basket. Email: Password:. Log in. Product Search: go. Help Me! OR: Search by Category. See Also: For my laying flock, should I buy fertile eggs to hatch, or should I start with baby chicks? A: Straight run birds are an "as hatched" mix of males and females.

Therefore, if you were to order eight straight run birds, for example, you will get between zero and eight roosters and between zero and eight hens--there is no way to tell.

Straight run chicks are sent "as hatched"--they are not sexed first and then separated out into each order. The reason is that expert sexers of day old chicks get top dollar since it is such a specialized skill--this is why ordering all straight run birds is less expensive than ordering all females. The only way to get sexed baby chicks is to purchase them sexed. Generally the hatching ratio of straight run orders averages out to be a mix, but you are more likely to hit the average if you have ordered large numbers.

For instance, you would expect that if you flipped a coin times, you would probably get heads around times. Even if you had a few runs of flipping tails all in a row, things would be equalled out eventually by runs of heads. If you flipped a coin only ten times, though, there is no guarantee you would get exactly five heads and five tails.

You might get four and six, seven and three, eight and two or nine and one. And they put females into a separate bin designated for females.

In the end, they would have three different types of bins: males, females and straight runs. These were clearly indicated, and this made it easy to keep them all straight.

This is completely fair. My preferred way to get baby chicks is to hatch from my own flocks. This helps me to be reasonably sure to set enough eggs and produce enough pullets. If you want a certain number of chicks to be females, I recommend buying pullets specifically. That means it would not at all be unusual if you wound up with males in the order. Some chicks, notably Easter Eggers also sometimes referred to Araucanas, though they are not true Araucanas , are more difficult to correctly sex.

It is difficult to determine the gender of Easter Eggers at the time of hatch and even as they grow older. Other breeds, as well, are more difficult to sex at hatch time. To increase the speed at which sexors can distinguish between male and female chicks, feather sexing is often used. Feather sexing is also a much simpler skill that people can learn more easily than vent sexing, so it can reduce the cost of sexing chickens, especially for large hatcheries.

It is when you rely on a sex-linked trait in some breeds that causes certain feathers to grow more rapidly in one gender than the other. For example, the males in a particular breed for a particular hatchery will have faster growing flight feathers than the females. I may be wrong about this, but I believe that you can take any breed and make it feather sexable. By maintaining separate male and female lines.