Chicken eggs in the United States were once available in two basic shell colors — unimaginative white and traditional farmstead brown. Along with the ongoing boom in backyard chicken flocks comes an interest in eggs with shells in a wider array of colors, including pink, blue and green. One of the most startling colors is […]
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The easy answer to the question “Why do chickens wipe their beaks?” is because they’re birds. Beak wiping involves rapidly scraping alternating sides of the beak on the ground or other surface. It’s an important activity for all birds, except maybe waterfowl. But why they do it remains something of a mystery, even to […]
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Chicken owners who collect and hatch eggs from their backyard breeder flocks may be divided into two camps: the so-called propagators or multipliers, who emphasize quantity, and the breeders, who emphasize quality. Both groups hatch lots of chicks. To the propagator, the end goal is the large numbers of chicks. To the breeder, a […]
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Conventional wisdom says you should never keep turkeys and chickens together, because turkeys are susceptible to blackhead, a disease with devastating consequences. However, lots of backyarders raise chickens and turkeys together without a problem, and with some benefits. Here are three good reasons to keep turkeys with chickens, and two reasons not to. Thumbs Up […]
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If you’ve never seen a chicken dust bathing, the sight can give you quite a shock. Lying in the dirt while vigorously twitching its feet and flopping its wings, the chicken first looks like it’s having an uncontrollable fit. Then it lies perfectly still in the hole it just dug, looking like death itself. Go […]
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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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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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