Development of the vertebrate retina requires complex temporal orchestration of transcriptional activation and repression. The chicken embryo is a classic model system for studying the developing retina. During chick development, embryonic day 8 (E8) retinas are packed with multipotent neuronal precursors on the cusp of differentiation into all retinal cell types. By E18 the retina is nearly fully mature with all major retinal cell types differentiated and expressing cell type specific genes. The epigenetic modification DNA methylation modifies the functionality of the genome, in part by regulating mRNA gene expression at certain loci.  However, genome-wide patterns of DNA methylation in the chicken retina are currently unexplored. In this study we used Illumina Next-Generation RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) as well as Whole Genome Bisulfite Sequencing (WGBS) to characterize both the mRNA transcriptome and the DNA methylome of E8 and E18 chicken retina. Current analyses are aimed at integrating these two large datasets to further understand how retina specific patterns of DNA methylation contribute to transcriptional regulation in rod and cone photoreceptors.