i'm getting my performance poultry order ready - if anybody wants any silkie chicks let me know I'd love order a mix of colours but at a minimum of 4 of each colour I can't go too crazy!
may be ordering others as well ...

I've been seriously considering some. Looking to end up with maybe 6 hens and a roo, not sure yet on colours. Want to chat about it sometime?

happily - I'd be quite happy to start a fair sized batch and you could pick a roo and however many hens you'd like ....

I'll shoot you an email soon, I have a few questions. Thanks.

Silkies are notoriously hard to sex, unless you'd care to share your secret? They seem to mostly be roos, too. I have 4, and we are fairly certain one is a hen, two are roos, and one... who knows?

I was confused by all the suggestions that silkies are so hard to sex. I was handed my 2 silkies as day old chicks, and within minutes could tell which one was male and which was female. If you take the time to watch your chicks and understand chicken behaviors you can sex even a silkie with acuracy. Of the 6 I had last year, I knew for certain 3 were males, 2 were females. One I had a feeling was male, but was unsure until he was a week old.
How? I look at the feet first. All my roos had hairy feet and bushy legs, the hens had naked legs. Then I watched them interact. Even day old roos are all "in your face" with eachother, while the hen chicks tend to stand back. And the roos tended to be needy, looking to the baby hens for comfort (the baby roos would try snuggling under the baby hens).

When I get ready to move to Ns, I'll be ordering my austrolops from Performance Poultry, it seems the gene pool in Ns is small for what is considered a new breed there. I can't wait

Hmmm... I'm not too versed in chicken behavior. Thanks for the tips!

My info comes from chicken blogs since these are my first Silkies, and they are constantly bemoaning the inconsistency of these birds... combs/lack of combs, wattles/no wattles, color/lack of color, sparring/not sparring, and on and on. A neighbor of mine has gotten into Silkies heavily in the last year, and she has trouble sexing them too. The only way I've found to be at least partially accurate when picking chicks is to gently grasp their head and neck, and lift them up a couple of inches. The hens usually just dangle there with their legs outstretched, but the roos tend to kick your hand. I've still ended up with the occasional roo though.