Common Chicken Answers

It is interesting how fascinated people are when they find out that we have chickens. Perhaps it is because we are a young couple (relatively speaking) living in the city with busy lives. Well, you might be surprised to hear that there are lots of city-folk doing the backyard chicken mini-farm. For your reading pleasure, here are some answers to common questions that we get about chickens:

1. You don't have to have a rooster for hens to lay eggs. You only need a rooster if you want to greatly expand your little flock.

2. Chickens are not vegetarians. They love bugs, worms, small snakes (I have a video to prove it), and pretty much anything else. Some people give their chickens table scraps including....chicken. But rest assured, our chickens are not cannibals....we only give them vegetable scraps.

3. The yolk of an egg is NOT the baby chicken or what might have been the baby chicken.  The yolk is the food that the baby (if the egg gets fertilized) lives off of while it is maturing.

4. Our chickens lay one egg per day per chicken. So with five chickens, we get five eggs a day. But this is particular to the breed that we have, Rhode Island Reds, which we got because they are very strong egg layers. Some chickens don't lay so many.

5. You can have chickens in this city as long as they are "pets" and not farm animals. So, meet Roberta, Matilda, Pricilla, Rose Mary, and Josie. (Actually Josie was, at this time, in the laying box. I caught her in the act.)

6. I am pretty sure that we are not going to eat our chickens when they expire. The chickens that you buy at the grocery store are very young hens, thus tender. I just don't think that Roberta is going to taste that great in a few years...plus who wants to chop off the head, drain all the blood, dip in boiling water, pull all the feathers out, etc...with all the neighbors watching from their windows? Not I.

7. Hens only make noise in certain circumstances: 1) If we hear a loud squawk early in the morning we are sure to find an extra large egg in the laying box. 2) They get very excited when they see us in the yard and start making lots of noise....presumably because they think we are bringing them tasty snacks. Other than that, they pretty much keep their chatter to themselves.

8. Fresh eggs from free range chickens are much tastier than store bought. In fact, a regular store bought egg doesn't have any taste to me anymore. Also, brown eggs don't taste any different than white ones.

9. Our eggs are about 50% bigger than store bought eggs. This one is about 100% bigger...it was one of those freak eggs.

10. Chickens are really not that much work. If you want to learn more about how to raise them in the city, check out backyardchickens.com.

Any other questions?