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 […]
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 […]
From burrowing badgers to high-flying hawks, chickens have their fair share of dangerous predators to contend with. As chicken keepers, it’s up to us to protect our flocks from these threats whenever possible. That’s why we put together this handy infographic that identifies a number of common predators and offers suggestions on how to keep […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
When you raise hens from baby chicks, finding their first eggs can be exciting. Chickens don’t all start laying at the same time, so you’ll likely find an occasional small egg, then maybe one each day. Before long you’ll be finding multiple eggs daily. But since most chickens don’t lay an egg every day, how […]