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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A chicken’s spur is an outgrowth of the leg bone, consisting of soft tissue covered with a protective sheath made of the same tough keratinous material that makes up the chicken’s claws and beak. The spur starts out as a little bony bump. As the chicken matures, the spur grows longer, curves, hardens and develops […]
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Frenchman Guirec Soudée is sailing around the world with a crew of one — a Rhode Island Red hen named Monique. “I knew I wanted to sail alone, for sure, but I wanted a pet. I thought a chicken would be brilliant, because I could have fresh eggs at sea,” Guerec told The Guardian. “I […]
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The earliest record of anyone asking “Why did the chicken cross the road?” appeared in 1847, in a monthly New York magazine called The Knickerbocker. The answer, as printed in the magazine: “Because it wanted to get to the other side.” Since then, the question has spawned an infinite number of variations, and even […]
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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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Deciding how many chicks to order can be challenging. Often the determining factor comes down to how many you want, versus how many you need, versus how many your local regulations allow you to have. When starting a laying flock, decide how many eggs you want and size your flock accordingly. As a rough […]
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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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A male duck has a penis, unless it falls off. But that’s getting ahead of the story. Like most birds, chickens don’t have a penis. But ducks, geese, and other waterfowl are among the few species that do have a penis. It’s a long, corkscrew appendix that remains inside-out, tucked within the duck’s body […]
Continue ReadingDownload or Print Cackle Hatchery’s Guide to the Care of Baby Chicks (Pamphlet) Download of Print “The Care of Baby Chicks” eBook Cackle’s Safe Handling of Poultry Poster (Salmonella Safety) Table of Contents Arrival First Day Instructions Heating Feed Water Special Situations After the Chicks Arrive Litter Picking After 4 Weeks Baby Turkeys & Peafowl […]
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Like the males of 97 percent of all bird species, a rooster does not have a penis. An incubated egg that will become a rooster starts to develop a penis, but early in the second week of embryonic development, a cell death protein called Bmp4 cloaks the incipient penis, causing it to stop developing and […]
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