So, you finally did it. You went out and got chicks®. Now what? Here are eight facts about baby chicks that commonly surprise first time owners. Brooding baby poultry of any type generates a lot of fine dust, so locate your brooder where dust won’t be a problem. Your living room or guest room, for […]
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Chickens are endlessly fascinating. The more time you spend with them, the more you discover how intensely complex these creatures are. Here are 20 weird and wonderful facts about chickens: If all the chickens on earth were evenly distributed among all the people on earth, each person would have at least 3 chickens. The chicken […]
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A bantam is a small chicken, about one-fourth to one-fifth as big as a standard-size chicken, generally weighing no more than 2 pounds. The popularity of bantams, affectionately known as banties, began as families moved from farms into suburban areas, and escalated from there. People who enjoy keeping bantams find that they require little backyard […]
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Chick season® for most birds is in the spring. Poultry, like other birds, gear up for laying eggs and hatching them as the days start growing longer in spring. Also like other birds, most poultry are seasonal breeders. The length of the breeding season depends largely on the type of poultry. Chickens and other […]
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Sooner or later nearly every poultry keeper will want to try hatching eggs in a mechanical device known as an incubator. With the huge number of different egg incubators now available, selecting a model can be daunting. In choosing the best model to fit your needs, consider each of these features: Price First […]
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In comparison to other poultry species, little is known about how turkeys were originally domesticated. What is known is that wild turkeys are indigenous to the Americas and were kept by Native Americans centuries before the arrival of Europeans. Various tribes ate turkey eggs, as well as enjoying turkey meat, both cooked fresh and dried […]
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Whether or not your chickens experience cold stress in winter depends on a number of factors, including how rapidly the temperature drops, how cold it gets, how long it stays cold and the chickens’ ability to stay dry and out of the wind. A well-feathered bird can be perfectly comfortable at an air temperature of […]
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Chickens have a naturally high body temperature, averaging around 106°F, which allows them to remain active despite cold weather. As the temperature drops, a chicken’s metabolism speeds up to keep the bird warm. At the same time, the flow of blood to a chicken’s legs decreases to minimize the escape of body heat from […]
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Giving chickens to underprivileged women will lift them out of poverty. So says Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan, who is getting a lot of flak from his country’s political elite. But consider this: Chickens were once the savior of poverty-stricken rural Americans, according to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace (1933-1940). In the 1900s, […]
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It’s a problem every chicken keeper eventually faces: What to do with unwanted roosters. If you purchase chicks, or hatch your own, you’ll have this problem sooner rather than later. Even sexed chicks that are sold as pullets (young hens) almost invariably include one or more cockerels (young roosters). If you end up with more […]
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