Life on the Farm
The mysteries of the origin of chicken talk and human speech may be found in the goings-on among the frogs and toads in your farm pond, says my ornithologist friend Gene Morton, who has written extensively on animal behavior and...
Anyone who spends much time around chickens can tell by the sounds they make if they are frightened, contented, cautious, and a whole range of other emotions. But no one has definitively resolved the question: Exactly how many words do...
When we built our chicken coop into a corner of our barn, we considered digging out the dirt floor and pouring a concrete slab. Concrete is the most expensive floor option for a coop. But concrete is the best floor...
One of our chicken coops is constructed in the back half of the last bay in our barn. The total size of the coop enclosure is 75 square feet. Once we installed a feeder and drinker, a portable nest box,...
You would think chicken eggs should hatch 50% pullets (females) and 50% cockerels (males). Anyone who has hatched or bought chicks knows that the gender ratio of as-hatched chicks, otherwise known as straight-run, is rarely 50/50. One year I hatched...
Remembering to go out every night to close the chicken coop door became a huge chore after we moved our chickens one-eighth of a mile from the house. And then we built another coop even farther away. In winter it...
Before chicken keeping became a craze, and the oddball is now the person who doesn’t have chickens, people often asked me how I got into raising chickens. The major influence was my maternal grandmother, who kept a flock of Rhode...
If I hadn’t arrived in time to witness the event, I would never have known how my Marans rooster died.
