I have been very curious on how to determine the sex gender of birds. This is very true for chicken or pet birds or swiftlets when they are young.
This article from sciencedaily.com gives a very interesting ideas:
ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2008) —
Scientists in Germany are reporting development of test that can answer one of the most frustrating questions in the animal kingdom: Is that bird a boy or a girl?
Their study is a potential boon to poultry farmers and bird breeders.
Juergen Popp and colleagues point out that the boy-girl question can be difficult to answer in birds that lack distinctive, gender-related plumage.
Since birds lack external genital organs, sexing a bird typically involves endoscopic examination of the animal's gonads under general anesthesia or specific molecular biological methods.
Since these methods are expensive, time-consuming, and stressful for the bird, scientists long have sought a quick, minimal-invasive sexing alternative.
In the new study, researchers describe such a test, which involves analysis of tissue pulp from birds' feathers using a highly sensitive lab instrument.
The method, called ultraviolet-resonance Raman (UVRR) spectroscopy, took less than a minute, and identified the birds' sex with 95 percent accuracy, the scientists say.
The article "Minimal Invasive Gender Determination of Birds by Means of UV-Resonance Raman Spectroscopy" is scheduled for the Feb. 15 issue of ACS' Analytical Chemistry. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ac702043q
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