Thirteen Things About Chickens

1. There are hundreds of breeds / varieties of chickens. Big chickens, little chickens, chickens of all different colors, chickens just for meat, chickens just for eggs, chickens for feathers…
2. Chickens can lay brown or white eggs. The color of the egg depends on the breed of chicken, and you can tell which color egg it will lay by looking at its earlobes. White earlobes mean white eggs, brown earlobes mean brown eggs. There’s no nutritional difference between the two.
3. Actually, chickens can lay blue or green eggs too. The shell, that is. But only a special breed of chicken does this - naturally, it’s called “the easter egg chicken”.
4. Chickens eat everything - bugs, grass, weeds, fingers, toes… well, they would eat the last two, if you let them.
5. Chickens can fly. Not far - perhaps twenty feet - but they can. And do. But most of the time, they strut around on the ground.
6. Handling chicks frequently makes them friendly. Mine follow me all over the place, though only some of them allow me to pet them. I didn’t handle mine /quite/ enough.
7. Chickens lay an egg approximately every 25 hours. Many of the breeds bred to be great layers will lay an egg a day for many days in a row, before they skip a day and start over. Some breeds only lay an egg every two days. It also fluctuates depending on the time of year, health and food quality, and age.
8. They begin laying eggs at approximately 4.5-5 months, and will lay very small eggs at first! Then they gradually get bigger.
9. Egg production is dependent on light. In the winter months, without supplementary lighting, chickens may stop laying eggs altogether, as they need a good 15-17 hours of daylight a day to produce eggs. This mechanism is what prompted chickens to lay eggs in the spring and hatch them when the weather was favorable, and stop reproduction in the winter, when chicks would most likely die of exposure. Supplementing light (just a lightbulb will do) will keep them laying through the winter, though the cold may slow production a bit.
10. Chickens do not need a rooster to lay eggs. Egg production happens whether there’s roosters around or not - they just aren’t /fertilized/ eggs. (Rather like a woman menstrates every month, whether she has sex or not.) There’s no nutritional (or visual, or taste-ual) difference between fertilized and unfertilized eggs. The only difference is that if incubated (either in an incubator, or under a hen’s warm body), a fertilized egg will hatch into a chick. Most commercial chickens never see a rooster.
11. A hen is born with as many egg yolks (tiny, undevloped yolks) as she will ever produce. If she uses those up, she’ll never lay an egg again.
12. A hen will lay her best in her first year of laying. Then her production will slowly dwindle.
13. 22 chickens provides way too many eggs for a single gal and all her neighbors, too. *drowns in eggs*

3 Comments »

1. I love chickens and raised them for a spell in my life. I grew up at my grandmother’s with chickens. I miss giving the scraps to chickens and the grass and weed clippings after cleaning the ward. No waste. I think having a chicken (s) is a symbol of contentment.

   Comment by Dorothy — October 11, 2007 @ 1:13 pm

2. Hee, I’ve been educated. I didn’t know about chickens not laying eggs in winter because of light. Oh, speaking of menstration, I was telling Heidi about you making a comment about egg-laying being like chickens popping out dead, unfertilized babies, and how it skeeved me out. And Heidi (ever so helpfully) says, “actually, it’d probably be more like you’re eating their menstration.” THAT HELPS. really.

   Comment by amber — October 11, 2007 @ 4:37 pm

3. Chicken is my favourite food. I love eggs too, though I have to think about cholesterol.

   Comment by Nicholas — October 11, 2007 @ 11:19 pm

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