What Lynn looks at first
The chicks in this video are one week old, hatched out of the incubator, and Lynn says up front that she is hoping for more hens. She shows two different ways to look at a chick that young, and the first one is the wing feathers, which is the way Travis showed her.
The second sign is the tail. On the first chick she believes is a pullet, the thing she notices before anything else is that the little tail feathers are already starting, and she says roosters do not do that at this age. The chick she thinks is a boy has no tail feathers coming out at all.
How she reads the wing feathers
On the Easter Egger she thinks is a boy, Lynn points out how short his feather span is and that every feather is the same length. When she divides the wing there is nothing behind the primaries, no secondary set at all.
Then she holds a pullet a different way so she can spread the wing out, and when she pulls the feathers apart you can see a row of long primary feathers with a shorter set of secondaries sitting behind them. She says the chick does not like being held that way but puts up with it long enough to show.
On the Black Copper Marans she believes is a hen, she describes the same thing as a long, a short, a long, a short all the way across, and adds that the girls' feathers are a whole lot longer than the boys' at the same age. That bird already has tail feathers coming out at one week, along with a spot on her head, and a moment later Lynn points out the furry legs coming in on her the way the Black Copper Marans do.
The rest of the chicks she checks
She runs the same check on a Rhode Island Red, where the long primaries and the short secondaries show up easily on that color, and the tail is already growing in. Lynn calls that one an easy read.
The last bird is the chick her grandbaby and papa named JJ. Lynn turns her so the wing opens and points out the long short long short pattern and the tail feathers at one week old, which is enough for her to call JJ a hen.
What the rooster looked like
After the pullets, the chick Lynn is most confident about looks different straight away. His feathers are short, they do not come apart into two lengths, they are all long ones of the same size, and where a tail would be he has only a little fuzz.
Even then she does not call it settled. She says she is pretty sure, ninety percent sure, that this one is her Black Copper Marans rooster, and that is as far as she will go on camera.
Her count, and how she handles them
By the end her tally is nine hens and two roosters out of eleven chicks, and she says she will keep watching as they grow. She points out that they change fast at this age and plans to look at them again the following week.
In between the feather checks she is handling every single bird. She says she works with them two or three times a day so they do not grow up scared of her and will want to come to her instead, and she keeps at it even while a chick is squirming through the wing check.
If your own chicks are not reading as clearly as hers, you can always Ask Lynn.