‘An enthusiastic chorus of adolescent cawing reverberated around the valley as loud as a Welsh male voice choir'

Sexing his latest chicks is a priority for poultry diarist Julian Hammer as he doesn’t want a repeat performance of the high noise levels he (and his neighbours) experienced from the first clutch of incubator males

- Julian Hammer

As our chicks grow older we wait with bated breath to see how many are cockerels. We usually hatch out four or five clutches of up to 16 eggs between spring and autumn, but this year we had a late start to the breeding season when we decided to keep our cockerel Rambo and bring in some new hens to mate with him. Mine and my wife Emma’s plans were then disrupted further when I broke my leg (Country Smallholding, October 2019), severely restricting what we could manage to do on the smallholding. As a result, this year’s hatchings have been limited to some Indian Runner ducks and one clutch of five chicks. Worst of all, we’ve been forced to buy chicken for dinner from the supermarket. Free range and organic, but it still doesn’t taste as good as our own.

Our cockerel is a Cream Legbar White Leghorn cross and we bred him with a selection of hens, some layers and some larger table bird breeds, such as the Light Sussex, a particular favourite of mine. One problem with these cross breeds is that we can’t sex the chicks when they hatch. With some crosses it becomes obvious which are boys after six weeks, but with many we can’t be certain until they start to crow. This can be a bit noisy and is guaranteed to upset the neighbours. The dulcet tones of one cockerel is an acceptable, or at least excusable, part of rural life, but when accompanied by a full chorus of adolescent crowing from a bevy of boisterous boys, the noise beggars belief, as we discovered in our first breeding season.