How do you determine the sex of a parakeet?

I want to know the difference of a female or male.

I've heard the males are brighter in color

Look at the cere, the fleshy piece of skin above the beak. Although it will vary with different color mutations, typically it is blue in males, and a white/brown color in females. However in certain mutations it can be a pearly color in both males and females. To be 100% sure, go to http://www.aav.org to locate an avian vet and have your bird DNA sexed.Certain mutations, like albinos, lutinos, and clear pieds, cannot be visually sexed and require either the laying of an egg (obviously female:)) or DNA sexing.Please note that an absence of egg laying does NOT indicate a male; some hens rarely or even never lay eggs.

There is a piece of skin just above their beak. On boys it is usually blue and on girls it is a lighter colour, usually pink. Other than that, only a special surgery can tell.

Providing it a regular American or English parakeet and not a Grasskeet or South American Conure (called parakeets by some) you should be able to tell by the color of the Cere.Click here for details.http://www.budgies.org/info/faq.html#sexing

As silly as this may sound, you can distinguish the sex by examining the feet. Female parakeets usually have smoother feet than the male. The feet are also lighter in color such as light-pink. Moreover, female parakeets are more passive in character and can be louder than the male when they choose to sing. In addition, they have a slender build.

This question is obviously already answered, but I had this type of bird once. We couldn't determine the gender, so we asked a specialist.He called it an it. Neither boy nor girl. How sad is that?

After seeing the answers here and how far off most were hopefully I can answer your question correctly. For one you dont go by how the feet look, and males are not just brighter then females. How old is the Parakeet? males and females are visually the same at a young age, yes you can tell the sex by the color of the cere. The cere is where the nostrils. Very young Parakeets ceres are lavender. around 10 to 12 months the Parakeets are sexually mature. The male's cere is any shade of blue, and the female's cere can be shades or light tans to light browns to even a cream color, but they are never any shade of blue. Save your self the cost of DNA testing the cost of the test may costs more then what you paid for the bird. SapphyreCertified Avian Specialistwww.borrowed-rainbow.comJoin us at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BorrowedRainbowAviary/

If by "parrakeet" you mean a budgie, then the color of the CERE should be different in accordance with sex. This "cere" is the bit of skin other people have referred to in their answers. I don't think this is a 100% reliable method, though. As regards other parrakeet species , some are, and some are not sexually dimorphic. It varies species to species. For example: scarlet-chested parrakeets are easy to sex because they are very clearly sexually dimorphic; bourke's parrakeets can only be DNA sexed (the safest, least-invasive scientific method) because they are NOT sexually dimorphic...

It's hard to tell whether a parakeet is male or female when they are babies but as they get older there is a patch of skin right above the beak and it will change color...The color determines the sex...

After about 3 months you can tell by the strip of skin (cere)sp? above the beak? Blue-male Brown-female !!I've found that males are easier to handle, my opinion.~:>=

In general, the color of a parakeets cere is the simplest indicator of sex in adult parakeets: males are blue, and females are white, light beige, reddish, or brown. While it is fairly accurate, the color of the cere cannot always be used to sex a parakeet. With some color varieties, like albinos, lutinos, fallows, and some recessive pieds like harlequins, both males and females have beige or pink colored ceres. Other visual sexing methods include females having an almost invisible, whitish rings around their nostrils, and males having more rounded, bulbous ceres, both of which are often hard to recognize to the untrained eye. And many people also say that females bite harder than males and that males have rounder heads while females heads are more flat on the top.