Chicken Care Basics

Eyes should be bright and alert with nothing running out of them, and the nostrils clean. Hold the bird up near your ear and listen for a wheeze or a rattle. Gasping is worse. Head shaking counts as a warning, and so do dirty wing feathers, because a chicken wipes its nose on its wing. Swelling around the face, walk away.

Comb and wattles ought to be red and soft, warm when you touch them, and the face should look full instead of shrunken in. A hen in lay carries a big bright red comb. When it is small and pale she has quit, though heavy mite loads and internal parasites pale a comb too. Any healthy bird fights you hard when you hold it.

Turn the bird over and part the feathers around the vent. Northern fowl mites are the most common external parasite on chickens, about a twenty-fifth of an inch across, and they show up as dark specks skittering across the skin. Lice are different. They leave white nits cemented onto the feather shafts.

Leg scales should lie flat and look waxy. When they peel upward toward the toenail you are looking at scaly leg mites burrowing underneath, and a bad case leaves the legs thick and crusty for the rest of that bird's life. Count the toes and check they run straight. Four on most breeds, five on Faverolles and Silkies.

Grab both legs in one hand and hold the wings down with the other. That is how you pick a chicken up. Carrying one by the head, the neck, the wings, or the tail injures it. In the crate, give each bird eight inches of width, twelve of depth, and ten of height, and make sure air moves through.

Crates stay upright and out of the wind. Never haul birds in a trunk. Mature males ride separately, and so do different species. Eight hours is as long as they should go without feed and water. When you pull in, unload right away and look every bird over for injuries.

New birds bring disease into a flock even when they look fine, because one that got over something can still shed it. Pen new arrivals well away from your own for two weeks at minimum, and three or four weeks is better. Chore your established birds first every day and save the newcomers for last.

Set the pen up so a bird finds water and feed the moment you turn it loose. Poultry out of a sale yard have often gone eight hours or more with neither one. Electrolytes will perk up a tired bird, or three tablespoons of sugar per quart. Refill it daily, because sugar water sours.

Chickens run a pecking order and a stranger gets pecked. Once quarantine is up, pen the newcomers inside the main run for a few days so the two groups can meet through wire. Move them into the coop after dark once that has run its course.

Figure three square feet of coop floor per standard bird, two per bantam. You will see smaller numbers quoted, a square foot and a half up to two per hen. Treat those as a hard floor. Crowding is what starts feather pecking.

Two square feet per hen is the usual allowance for plain outdoor access, and real pasture takes a lot more ground than that. Bury the fence wire twelve inches deep, then toe it outward six inches so anything digging runs into more wire. Net the top against hawks.

Air has to move through the coop. Oxygen comes in, moisture and ammonia go out. When the floor is damp, or you catch a bite of ammonia opening the door in the morning, you need more air. Put the openings up high and away from the roost. Cold by itself does not bother a chicken much, though wet and cold together will kill one.

Chickens want up off the floor at night. Give each hen six inches of perch, a foot of horizontal space between perches, eight inches off the wall, and set the lowest perch about three feet up. They would rather have something they can wrap their toes around.

One nest per five hens is comfortable. One per eight still works without eggs ending up on the floor. A hen wants her box dark and out of the traffic, bedded deep enough that an egg lands soft. Keep the roosts higher than the nests so nobody sleeps in a box.

Chick starter runs about twenty-four percent protein, usually as a crumble. Medicated starter has a coccidiostat in it. That matters, because coccidiosis hits hardest between three and six weeks. Keep the brooder near ninety-five degrees the first week, then drop it five degrees a week.

Around two months old, start stepping the protein down. Mix the new feed into the starter over a week or more, since an abrupt change stresses birds. Hold off on layer feed until the pullets are laying. That calcium level is hard on a bird who is not building eggshells.

A laying hen runs on sixteen to twenty percent protein. Pellets waste less than crumbles, because birds scratch crumbles onto the ground and that draws rodents. Put oyster shell in its own dish, free choice. Hens vary in how much calcium they want.

People mix these two up constantly. Grit is small stone. It sits in the gizzard and grinds feed, and a bird eating nothing but commercial feed has no use for it. Birds getting whole grains need it, and so do birds ranging where pebbles are scarce. Oyster shell is calcium. It grinds nothing.

Chickens drink about twice as much water as they eat in feed, and in heat that can double or quadruple. Cut a laying flock off for a few hours and production drops. If you fill by hand, fill twice a day, because hens drink heavily toward dusk.

A hen lays one egg in a day at the most. Building one takes about twenty-six hours, so she lays a little later each day until she skips one altogether. A home flock will produce on and off for three or four years. Each year the eggs come fewer and bigger, and the shells get thinner.

Chickens come into lay as the days lengthen and quit as they shorten, which is why most unlit Northwest flocks go quiet in the fall. Fourteen hours of light a day holds a flock in production, and a timer with a sixty watt bulb covers it. If you are buying started pullets, ask what light the birds have been under.

After roughly ten months of laying, a hen stops. She drops her feathers, rests a while, and comes back. Nothing is wrong when that happens. When birds go out of production sooner than that, look at water, feed, hours of light, and parasites before you go hunting for something exotic.

Gather once a day at least, twice if you can manage it, and never use a badly soiled egg. If you wash one, run water warmer than the egg over the shell instead of soaking it, then dry it all the way. Store them large end up on a refrigerator shelf at or below forty-five degrees.

Northern fowl mites live on the bird and gather around the vent. Chicken mites work differently. They hide in the cracks of the coop through the day, feed at night, and can go months with no host at all. Permethrin dust labeled for poultry kills the adults and does nothing to the eggs, so treat again every four to seven days and dust the coop while you are at it.

A light worm load often needs nothing done about it. A heavy one shows up as poor thrift, weight loss, pale combs, loose droppings, and egg counts falling off. Large roundworms do the most damage, thick as pencil lead and reaching four and a half inches. Check the FDA Green Book before you dose anything.

Bumblefoot is a staph infection of the footpad, and it shows as swelling and lameness. Wire floors are hard on chicken feet and bring on lameness later in life, so keep birds on litter over solid ground. Sweep the coop for nails and wire ends now and then. A swallowed staple wrecks a gizzard.

Coughing, sneezing, rattling breath, gasping, runny eyes or nostrils, swelling in the face, all of it points at the respiratory tract. The causes run from dust and ammonia up through mycoplasma, Newcastle disease, and avian influenza, and you cannot tell them apart by eye. Birds that recover often stay carriers.

Pull a sick bird the minute you spot it and crate it somewhere with soft bedding, feed, and water. Marek's disease has no cure. A bad case of flystrike is usually kinder to end than to treat. If birds start dying with no explanation, send one to a state diagnostic lab.

Buy from someone who will let you look at the birds and can tell you their health history. The safest purchase you can make is birds of similar age, from one source, all at once. Unknown sources bring in trouble that outlasts the birds themselves, since some of these agents sit in a coop for months.

The National Poultry Improvement Plan got started in the 1930s to drive pullorum, salmonella, mycoplasma, and avian influenza out of breeding flocks. Breeders who participate test for pullorum-typhoid and vaccinate against Marek's disease. Ask a seller for their NPIP number. Ask whether the chicks got that vaccine too.

Wild birds carry avian influenza, and mites and parasites along with it, so screen your coop windows and vent openings. Clean up spilled feed. It draws sparrows and rodents both. Keep feeders and waterers where wild birds cannot get at them. A perimeter fence pays for itself if the gates stay shut.

Anybody handling your flock should have stayed clear of other birds for twenty-four hours. That covers swap meets, live bird markets, pet stores, and a morning of hunting. Keep a pair of boots that never leaves the bird yard. Do the clean jobs first and leave manure for the end of the day.

All of that runs the other direction too. While anything in your flock is showing symptoms, hold the birds off the market. Meet buyers at the driveway rather than walking them through your coop. Tell people what the birds eat and what they have been vaccinated or treated for.

Chickens carry salmonella in their droppings and on their feathers, feet, and beaks, and they look perfectly clean while they do it. It gets onto hands, shoes, and clothing. People get sick when any of that reaches their mouth. One 2014 outbreak traced back to hatchery chicks infected 126 people across 26 states.

Soap and warm running water, twenty seconds, every time you touch a bird or anything that came out of the pen. Backs of the hands, wrists, between the fingers, under the nails. Keep sanitizer out at the coop for when there is no sink.

No kissing chicks, no snuggling them, and hands stay away from the face while a kid is holding a bird. Poultry stay out of the house and out of anywhere food gets made or served. Wash feeders and waterers outdoors, never in the kitchen sink. Small children need an adult right there.

Opinion is split on this one, and your state may settle it for you. Even a clean-looking egg carries bacteria on the shell, and proper washing takes most of that off. American commercial eggs get washed for that reason. Europe went the other way. Wash one badly and you have made it worse.

Cook eggs until the yolks are firm, and cook anything with egg in it all the way through. That instruction is printed on every carton sold in this country and it holds for your own birds just the same. The other half of it is keeping eggs at or below forty-five degrees.