Chicks

When you buy day-old baby chicks, you can build a bond with your flock from their earliest days of life. When you want to create a small backyard flock of chickens to produce eggs for your meals, you’re investing in a lifetime with your birds. Unless butchered, most chicken species live for about a decade. Many people consider their small bird flocks pets, and buying them as infants lets you bond with them as a mother hen would.

What does "unsexed" mean?

Many of our chicken options, such as splash standard Cochin chicks or buff-laced Polish chicks, only offer unsexed chick orders. Other chicken options, such as cream legbar baby chicks, offer selections of unsexed, male, or female. The term unsexed means an order that does not separate chicks by gender. In fact, it does not even check for gender because many chicken species don’t develop signs of gender until weeks after their birth.

How Does an Unsexed Order Affect Building a Flock?

Your unsexed poultry flock may be made up of half roosters and half hens. At about five weeks, baby chicks usually develop the feathers and other features that differentiate boys from girls. At six weeks, when they can leave the brooder, you’ll need to divide them into small flocks of one rooster for 10 hens or fewer.

Once mature, roosters do not get along with one another. Any coop with more than one rooster in it will have a fight to reduce the number to one rooster. Dividing the flock into small coops with attached runs offers the simplest solution.

Roosters as Meat Birds

Separate the roosters and fatten up all but one. Chickens are bred to gain weight quickly, so they can provide meat for meals. Stromberg’s offers many meat birds, including the Cornish Rock Cross, a prime meat chicken.

We also sell eggs and incubators, so you can let them hatch on your farm. Shop now!