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One bright morning in May, I traveled to Forest Lake, Minnesota where I adopted six baby chicks. By October, those babies were gone. In their place were six fine young cockerels and pullets. This post is about what happened in between.
If Marek’s Disease strikes your flock there’s very little you can do except suffer as your sick chickens suffer, and end their suffering when it becomes severe. There is no cure. Thus, your best strategy is to prevent Marek’s from harming your flock in the first place.
Leslie Crawford has ably imagined and narrated this story of Gwen’s great adventure, and Sonja Stangl’s illustrations have perfectly captured the whimsy inherent in all things chicken. Together they show children, and adults that “happily ever after” is a real thing—and making it happen can be as simple as letting chickens live like chickens.
When you adopt baby chicks, you’re taking small, helpless, peeping balls of fluff under your wing. It’s a big responsibility, and if you’ve never done it before, you should make sure you understand the list of basics before you undertake this big venture. If you have done it before, it’s good to pull out that list and review it just to make sure you have all your ducks in a row . Raising baby chicks is not hard, after all, but there are a few things you have to consider and a few things you need to do right.
This is part five of a series about the information printed on egg cartons. When you buy eggs with “cage-free” stamped on the carton, you probably think you’re doing the right thing. Cage-free eggs are a huge improvement from eggs that come from hens living in tiny, cramped battery cage torture chambers. But as Vital Farms points out, hens laying cage free eggs probably live in one square foot of space in a cramped barn and never get to go outside. Vital Farms advertises its eggs as “pasture raised” and guarantees that each hen gets 108 square feet of outdoor space.
After our pet chicken dies, then what? We are often loath to talk about it, because too many people just don’t get it. While nearly everybody understands the importance of our cats and dogs in our lives, to most folks, chickens are “just chickens.”
You’re in the egg aisle at the supermarket and want to get eggs from hens that are treated humanely. So, you grab the eggs with the green and white USDA Organic label and put them in your cart. Organic must be good, right? But what does it even mean in terms of how the hens are treated? Perhaps not very much.
Author, humorist, and radio-show host Michael Perry tells us the story of his first year in an old house on a Wisconsin acreage with his new wife and daughter. It is a tale of lurching forward with pigs and chickens and gardening and hay-making and wood splitting and don’t forget building a chicken coop, and of course a home birth—all while maintaining a full-time career. And other impracticalities. Nonfiction. Really.
Was Tyrannosaurus rex really just a big chicken? Are chickens are the closest living relative to Tyrannosaurus rex? Are chickens directly descended from T. rex? Are chickens dinosaurs? All your questions answered right here!
You may know the story of Betty the transgender chicken - the hen that underwent spontaneous sex reversal and became a rooster - and you may be wondering what happened to Betty after that story ended. This is the next story.
What makes a hen a hen and a rooster a rooster? And what makes a hen a rooster?
This is part three of a series about the information printed on egg cartons. I’ve found you can learn from all that carton information once you figure out what it's actually saying. And sometimes you can learn a whole lot by what it doesn’t say. Wild Harvest is a brand aimed at consumers who prefer natural and organic products. These are consumers who expect that the producers of the food products they buy are adhering to strong and consistent animal welfare standards. Are these consumers getting what they think they’re getting when they buy Wild Harvest eggs?
The basic requirements to keep your chickens happy and healthy during the cold winter months.
Chickens in your backyard provide a unique ambience. They also provide nonstop entertainment. And don’t forget the eggs - they generously offer daily eggs. What else? Oh, yeah. Poop. They give us lots of poop. They are veritable pooping machines! Who would have imagined?! Here’s how to deal with it.
Remember when chicken sweaters were the BIG FASHION THING? Maybe not. It actually only lasted a day in my coop. But it’s a day the Hipster Hens will never forget.
This is the saga of how one tenacious little red hen at death's door fought her way back to the land of the living. It is also the tale of my search for the needle of truth about a confusing chicken disease and its treatment in the haystack of conflicting information on the internet. Sometimes, in order to do the right thing for your sick chicken, you have to sift through a lot of hay, then grit your teeth and hope you’re grabbing the needle.
A hen can go from normal to fly-blown in 24 hours, and can go from fly-blown to dead in an equally short period of time.
