It is delightful to select your own Olive Egger chicks from the brooder! But since most F2 olive egger breedings only produce 50% of chicks who carry a blue egg gene and half of those will be male, you statistically have a 25% chance of randomly selecting an olive laying female. Yikes. I’ll share some tips on how to visually sex Olive Egger chicks and what traits to look for to double your odds of getting the gorgeous green egg laying girls you have been dreaming of! Here is how to sex and select olive egger chicks:
How to Sex and Select Olive Egger Chicks
Hybrid (cross-breed) chicks can be some of the easiest or some of the hardest to sex. I find the Marans parentage in Olive Egger chicks tends to complicate the process but if you have a keen eye, I’ve got some tips that can help increase the odds of selecting an olive laying pullet.
Knowing What Breeds Have Been Crossed Helps
Ameraucanas, Crested Cream Legbars, Black Copper Marans, Blue Copper Marans, Whiting True Blues, Wheaten Marans and Welsummers are some of the most popular purebreds used in creating Olive Egger crosses. Black Copper Marans carry a dominant black feather gene that often produces solid black females. Cream Legbars are a barred breed so Legbar hens will pass on barring to their sons only, which is indicated by the chick having a light yellow head spot. (This is also true of all barred Olive Egger hens when bred to a solid color rooster. Their sons will be barred but daughters will not.) Welsummers carry two recessive wild type feathering genes so chicks will either be chipmunk (two recessive wild type genes) or a solid color (from a dominant feather gene). Olive Egger chicks with feathering on their legs have Marans parentage somewhere in their lineage, no matter their actual feather color. Ameraucanas and Whiting True Blues are pea combed breeds, which means their offspring who inherits a blue egg gene will almost always have a pea comb, too. Their pea comb + blue egg gene will carry forward for a number of generations. When purchasing Olive Egger chicks, ask the breeder about what breeds have been crossed to help you in your selection process.
Opt for Pea Combed Chicks
You won’t get olive eggs unless the hen is carrying a blue egg gene. That blue egg gene is tied to the same gene that controls pea comb inheritance so a pea comb indicates a 96% chance that the hen is also carrying the blue egg gene. Selecting chicks with a pea comb is the easiest way to guarantee the females will lay olive. If Crested Cream Legbars, with their straight combs, have been used to breed the olive egger chicks, all the chicks will have straight combs and this tip will not work. Similarly, if the olive laying parents all have straight combs, their offspring will too and this tip does not help you.
The Solid Black Chicks Are Slightly More Likely to be Female
Because of the way chicken genetics work, pullets usually inherit their father’s feather coloring. In Olive Egger breeding, Black Copper Marans roosters have been used consistently for so many years that you can use this knowledge to your advantage. If the father of the hatch you are viewing is a Black Copper Marans over hens of various feather colors, most of the females will hatch solid black. If the father of the hatch is a Black Olive Egger rooster, most of the females will also be solid black. This tip only works if the rooster is black feathered and mated to hens of varying colors. If the entire breeding flock is solid black, all the chicks will be black and this tip is of no help!
The Uniquely Colored Chicks are Likely Male
Everyone loves the pretty chicks! The ones with the most unusual colors or the only light colored one in the bunch. What most buyers don’t realize is that they are often snatching up the prettiest boy. When selecting your chicks from a hatch, try to observe feather growth before going for color. Dark chocolate brown down, rusty colored heads or multi-colored chicks have usually been males among my hatchlings.
Head Spots are Often Boys
If a barred rooster has been used to breed a hatch, every chick will have a head spot. If not, and the father is a non-barred rooster, the chicks with light yellow patches on the top or back of the head are almost always male. As I have bred my own olive egger flock, I’ve also noticed that chicks who hatch with a tiny rust (reddish brown) spot anywhere on the head or face are also usually male. Some of my males have hatched with an itty bitty yellow or dark blue (gray) dot somewhere on the head or face that are subtle but the observation has still held true: they are always boys. Those spots can be visually eye-catching but as we are learning, the most unique and unusual colored olive egger chicks are typically the boys! If a chick has an obvious head spot or facial spot – even if the spot is only on one side of the face – it has an increased chance of being a cockerel.
When Using Wing Sexing
Wing sexing olive egger chicks is difficult. It must be done 12 to 18 hours after hatching, otherwise the chicks tend to wing sex as “female” including the males. Even then, wing sexing is only believed to be 75-80% accurate. If you want to try wing sexing, select chicks with very, very long pin feathers at their wing tips. These are statistically most likely to be female. Be wary of a colorful, highly patterned chick that wing sexes as “female” because unique down colors tend to indicate male. In my own hatching experience, down color is more trustworthy than wing sexing and chicks with head spots have all been male, no matter what the chick wing sexes. (I do not use barred roosters in my olive egger breeding but I do have a barred hen and her sons all hatch with head spots.)
Sexing Inaccuracies
I carefully observed my May 2022 Speckled Olive Egger hatch and kept very good notes. I wing sexed each chick, had a breeder friend independently wing sex them for comparison and I kept notes about comb type plus leg and toe coloring for each. For whatever reason, some of my Olive Egger crosses of the same color would all wing sex as female but were, in fact, male. Several females wing sexed as male. There seemed to be no guarantee except that unique down colors and head spots turned out to be 100%males. The females were almost all solid black, a few were blue (only from my splash hens), one was a common brown chipmunk color and one a cream chipmunk color. In the end, my wing sexing was only 65% correct.
What About Tail Sexing?
Tail sexing is where you observe the tail development, or lack of development, in one-week-old chicks. Females generally develop tail feathers faster than males, who often still have fluff-nubs with nothing but down at 1 week old. Since olive eggers are a hybrid/mixed breed, there will always be an exception to this rule in the brooder box but this trick can help a little. Pairing tail sexing with down color observations is the easiest, hands-off way to get slightly better than a 50% chance of selecting a female. This is a handy method to use when you aren’t allowed to handle the chicks at a feed store but can point to which ones you want.
Buyer Beware
If buying just-hatched olive eggers, the breeder most likely cannot accurately sex your chicks. If she has kept the prettiest colored chicks for herself, any “straight run” chicks she sells may have slightly more females in the mix. (Seriously, so many of the females are solid black!) If the breeder has used a solid rooster and barred hens, the male chicks will all have head spots and are sex-linked.
Selecting Olive Egger Chicks for Breeding
If you are wanting to breed your own olive eggers from the chicks you are buying, ask if more than one rooster was used. If so, select a mix of different colored chicks to ensure maximum genetic diversity. The pretty ones will likely be your breeder males. Since people enjoy blue (gray) and splash (white with black flecks) hens in their olive egger flocks, you can opt to add those chick colors to your flock now. If only one rooster fathered the chicks, it is okay to breed hatchmates to each other because that is how true F2 and beyond Olive Eggers are most commonly bred. You will likely back-cross the chicks to get better blue genes or darker overlay genes before you need to worry about genetic issues appearing after the third generation of inbreeding/line breeding.
How Can I Tell Which Chicks are Speckled Olive Eggers?
Sadly, you can’t. Speckled Olive Egger chicks look just like Olive Egger chicks. It is up to the breeder to have hatched her own rooster from a heavily speckled egg, kept careful records and deliberately be breeding for speckles. Even then there is still a chance the pullet will not lay an egg with many, if any, speckles. The safest bet is to purchase chicks that are a repeat breeding of a cross the breeder already knows produces speckled olive eggers and you can view the eggs last year’s hatchlings lay. If you’d like to purchase speckled olive eggers from a hatchery, Hoover’s Hatchery is the only one I have found that is attempting to breed for speckles in some of their olive eggers using their nicely speckled Welsummer line.
Back Crossing to Blue Layers Tends to Remove Speckling
I have found that back crossing a Speckled Olive Egger hen to a blue gene carrying rooster tends to heavily dilute the speckling and can even remove it completely in her offspring. If you’re wanting speckled olive eggers, opt for chicks bred using speckled Marans, Welsummer or Speckled Olive Egger fathers.
What if I Get a Brown Laying “Olive Egger”?
There are a number of people reading this article to figure out how to get this exact bird. Some brown laying “olive eggers” produce stunning shades of cocoa, potato, dark earth and tree bark hues that are not found among any current purebreds. These girls are sometimes called Khaki Eggers, to distinguish that they came from olive egger breeding, and their unique brown tones are trending hard! The darkest cocoa shades typically come from Marans heritage or Marans back crossing. The mid-range tones are typically achieved by crossing olive egger roos with olive egger hens, and it is often in the F3 generations and beyond that you get the garden potato colored eggs. If you get a brown laying olive egger hen, chances are good that her egg is still a very interesting color, especially among speckled olive egger breedings. You may find that breeding her to an F1 Olive Egger roo carrying a good blue egg gene produces the eye-grabbing olive shades everyone adores!
Any Other Tips for Selecting Olive Egger Chicks?
Olive Eggers are completely addicting so be kind to your local breeders, even if the chicks don’t lay the exact shade you were hoping for. The breeder’s flock will improve with every year that passes. Develop a good relationship with your breeder and she may let you have first pick from her best project hatches.
I hope this article has given you some incredibly useful and actionable tips on how to sex and select olive egger chicks!
Dana says
I love your posts and I have learned a lot. You are obviously very knowledgeable. Would you consider expanding your business and adding a best guess spot to your website? I would easily pay $3-5 to upload 5-6 pictures and get a best guess.
🙂
…I’m still stumped with a 5-week old Olive Egger.
Tay Silver says
Hi Dana!
You can actually get that help for free! On Facebook search for “The Olive Egger Page” group and request to join it. You’ll be able to post pictures of your olive egger chicks and thousands of keepers will help identify various indicators on whether your chick is looking like a cockerel or a pullet. It is a fantastic group!
Krizia Liquido says
What a well written post! Thank you for the information. I’ll also be joining that Facebook group as we hatched an Olive Egger (“Oliver”) 2.5 weeks ago.
Heather says
Hello,
If I’m reading this correctly, any chick (cockerel or pullet) I hatch from a Legbar rooster, will have the white dot on its head?
TIA
Tay Silver says
Hi Heather!
That is correct – a Crested Cream Legbar rooster is barred and carrying two barring genes, which he will pass on to 100% of his offspring. All of his chicks will hatch with head dots. Sadly, you may have a hard time selling any olive egger chicks from him (if you choose to do so) because buyers are becoming aware that a head dot in olive egger chicks is most often associated with males. Educating the buyer can be difficult, especially if all they see is a picture online and keep scrolling.
To create a sex-link using the Legbar breed, you need Legbar hens (with their one barring gene) bred to a non-barred rooster. With this pairing, the males will inherit the one barred gene from the mother hen and hatch with a light colored dot on their head. The females will NOT inherit a barring gene from their mother and will hatch with no head dot. However, sex-linking only works for the F1 generation. If you breed one of the single-barred-gene-carrying F1 males to his hatchmate sisters to create true F2’s, half the chicks will be expected to have head dots but it will not be sex-linked; a mix of both males and females will have head dots depending on gene inheritance and some males will not have head dots. Worse, you will not know who is carrying a blue egg gene since you began with the Legbar breed, who have a straight comb. You’ll need to raise each pullet to laying age and test breed each F2 cockerel to determine what genes they are carrying.
But Legbar roos are total sweethearts and since they are homozygous blue, you will breed 100% olive laying F1 daughters so don’t hesitate to use the good boy you already have if you want olive eggers!
Mallory says
Will a pullet from Welsummer x WTB cross *always* lay a speckled green egg?
Tay Silver says
Hi Mallory!
Sadly, no, the WTB x Welsummer cross is extremely dependent on the speckling genetics inherited from the one Welsummer parent. There is no way to guarantee the offspring ALWAYS lays a speckled egg. Using a Welsummer hen with very heavy speckling under a WTB roo has produced offspring who do lay speckles. But I have had at least two pullets who had a Welsummer mother and did not lay any significant speckling – their eggs appeared solid green. It is disappointing when this happens and it happened the most with my Welsummer named Cinnamon who laid the wacky polka-dotted eggs. It was not always strong enough to pass on to her daughters. There is a breeder theory that tint and speckling is best inherited from the father so using a Welsummer roo theoretically should produce better color and/or speckling. My very limited breeding experience with one Welsummer roo from Hoover’s Hatchery produced no speckled laying offspring. He must have not come from a heavily speckled egg himself and since I did not hatch him myself, I had no idea what genes he might have been carrying. I prefer to use WTB roos over Welsummer hens so I can view what the mother is laying and only hatch from the hen(s) with the absolute heaviest speckling.