Baby chicks are sold under one of three labels: pullets (young hens), cockerels (young roosters), or straight run (unsexed, you get to be surprised later). We bought pullets to grow up with our home-hatched chick, because we weren’t sure if it might be a rooster, and having too many in a flock can be problematic.
Chickens don’t have penises though (most birds don’t), and methods for sexing newly-hatched chicks aren’t 100% accurate. It’s fairly common for someone who buys pullets to end up with an accidental rooster. I was ready for that to happen, and even kind of hoped it would, so we could hatch our own eggs and have descendants from some of our favorite hens (Caramel).
Buckbeak was just over three months old when someone a chicken group online saw a photo and told me he was a cockerel. I hadn’t suspected it at all until then, but she pointed out the pointy orange saddle feathers on his lower back and asked if he also had spur buds on his legs. Lo and behold, he did! His tail feathers were also beginning to curl, a hallmark of adultescent male chickens.
I read up on roosters and how to avoid raising a mean one. I had heard some of them flog people, and can be abusive toward the hens, so I always kept a close eye on him. I read that some roosters are brave and noble, protecting their flocks from predators and calling the hens’ attention to any available treats rather than gulping them down themselves. Only time would tell which type of rooster we had.
I saw Buckbeak puff himself up toward the cat once, and he was definitely one of the boldest explorers in our new group of chickens, but he never crowed. Some days I made a point of waking up before sunrise to wait for it. Nothing. I never saw him try to mate with any of the hens either.
Then on New Year’s Eve, when Buckbeak was nearly seven months old, my daughter discovered a blue egg in the Slytherin nesting box. All of our hens and pullets were brown layers, as far as we knew. Buckbeak was an Easter Egger, who should have laid blueish eggs if he were female, but he was looking more roosterly now than ever. So we stalked him.
We already had our Wyze cam up in the coop to see who was laying and who wasn’t. I’d been anxiously awaiting an egg from Caramel, to try and incubate it now that we (thought we) had a rooster in the flock. I watched it intently the following day and confirmed the only possible origin for that blue egg: Buckbeak had laid it!
So how can a chicken who lays eggs look so much like a rooster? In the world of birds there’s something called a gynandromorph, an organism displaying both male and female characteristics. Apparently it happens when an egg is fertilized by two sperm. Two embryos begin to develop, but then merge at some point like Dwight Schrute claimed to have done with his twin on The Office. The result is a chick with two different sets of genes (ZZ for male and ZW for female) all throughout its body. (I guess this can happen when both embryos are the same sex also, but it wouldn’t create a gynandromorph in that case, and no one would ever be the wiser).
There are two ways this type of chicken can look. A bilateral gynandromorph is split evenly down the middle. It’ll look like a hen on the right, and a rooster on the left, or vice versa. The other presentation is a mosaic gynandromorph, which is what I suspect Buckbeak might be, with male characteristics in some places on the body, and female characteristics in others.
Buckbeak obviously has at least one ovary in her body, and the question that keeps me up at night now is what she has on the other side. It could be another ovary, a testicle, or nothing at all. She could be capable of fertilizing eggs in addition to laying them, which blows my mind.
The eggs she lays do look fertilized to me, and no one else in our flock resembles a rooster at all. Supposedly you can tell a fertilized egg from an unfertilized one based on the appearance of the blastodisc, the white spot on the yolk. In an unfertilized egg, like you’d get from the grocery store, it should always be a small, closed dot. In a fertilized egg, it should look like a bullseye (in which case it would be more accurately referred to as a blastoderm).
Now I’ve never had an official, confirmed rooster before, and I’ve never cracked an egg to see a confirmed bullseye blastoderm, so my assessment of our eggs may be unreliable. But I posted photos of it in chicken groups for feedback, and most chicken keepers seemed to agree it looks fertilized. My husband says that for the sake of science, we should incubate one of the eggs and see if anything develops, but I’m afraid the outcome could be something other than a normal, healthy chick.
Whether Buckbeak is a hen or something more complicated than that, she has a lifelong home with us. She’s not a cuddly chicken, but she isn’t aggressive, and she gets along well with her flock mates, especially our silver laced Wyandotte hen Woodpeck Peck. I’m going to try and post a video of her laying soon, for my chicken-keeping friends who believe someone else has to be laying these blue eggs. I’m also curious about how s/he’ll look after molting, so I’ll be sure to update the photos when that happens. Meanwhile I guess I’ll keep listening every morning for a ‘cock-a-doodle-doo!’
