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So it's not necessarily true that you couldn't do this without impacting fertility or masculinity, but it is true that you'd have to work pretty hard at it and it might bring some unfortunate trade-offs alongside. Effectively, you're trying to disconnect a secondary sex trait from the cascade of...

Worth noting that this is more difficult than a similar surgery would be on a mammal because chickens, like all birds, don't actually have a larynx--what we normally mean by "voicebox." Instead, they have two syrinxes, one on each side of the bifurcation as the single larynx splits to reach each...

Actually, not so much: we don't have any genomic data from terror birds, and we also don't have a convenient source of eggs in which to gestate them. (Even the extant ratites we do have, like ostrich and emus, are quite distant relatives and can't necessarily be expected to provide a suitable...

I bet you folks who show poultry would know.

Hm. How urban is the place you're moving to, and how are you moving to the new place? If you have a trailer or a large car, you might be able to get away with simply leaving the chickens in their dog crates for a few days to a week--just add new bedding, food, and water as necessary. Most...

Is it important to you that the blue or green layers be purebred? There seem to be a few hatcheries offering designer crosses with barred or blue birds at your price point that lay green or blue eggs: there's a barred Creme Legbar cross and some other crested blue cross out of Meyer, Murry...

"Self blue" will be like that because "self [adjective]" is an old animal fancy term for an animal that is solid [adjective], without any white markings or other patterning. I imagine that in chickens, lavender got "self blue" in contrast to blue because lavender is never laced but blue usually...

Have you heard the gospel of Sci Hub? It's a free repository of peer reviewed journal articles, and it has just about everything. (Since pirating journal articles doesn't hurt the authors--scientists don't get paid for journal articles, and the peer reviewing is also donated labor--and the...

There was a huge craze a couple of years ago for "Favaucanas," as I recall? Those are just a splash Ameraucana crossed to Faverolles. Aside from color, those should give you a pretty good idea of what the offspring will look like / lay like / act like if you track down reviews from people who...

Well, I enjoy all the systematic approaches you routinely drop in here. I particularly like the way you take all that time to document why you think a given thing and often provide scholarly sources for the things you say. It's been really nice reading your work, and I enjoy the culling project...

Jack Horner (the paleontologist-consultant for Jurassic Park) has been trying to pull that off for just about a decade now. I remember listening to his "chickenosaurus" pitch at a genetics seminar right out of undergrad a few years back; it's never a good sign when a speaker explicitly tells the...

Do you think a tarp with holes cut for "windows" to allow easy airflow to work? I'm wondering if that might not be the easiest way to make the whole thing go. Alternatively, I'm seeing a lot of hoop coops that put the ventilation very low, at ground level, with wholly covered areas at roost...

Yeah, I'm not even going to pretend I'm going to move the coop in the winter! Wherever it is by first snowfall is where it's staying until snowmelt, thank you very much. (This is going to be my second real winter after fifteen years in Georgia and Texas, so I'm very aware of my own limitations...

Hi! I posted about inheriting a coop at the house I bought a few months ago and ultimately have decided to scrap it* and start fresh with a totally new setup. I'm in Minnesota, so I'm thinking carefully about my designs, and I'm not intending to actually acquire chickens until the coop is done...

Oh, I really appreciate the version with the hen in it--that was something I hadn't considered originally, because going from "more ventilation == better" doesn't... necessarily take into account what the height of the roosts actually is! Showing the hen and the position of the roosts helps...

Idly, what do you think about cricket flour as a protein source? Crickets are a little more carbohydrate-heavy and a lot less fat-heavy than any larval insect protein, as I understand it; larvae of any species are always pretty high-fat. How do crickets stack up relative to fish meal as a...

Sorry, I meant the run space is larger--~200sqft or so, vs the 40sqft that would be implied by the 10ft per bird rule of thumb for runs. You're perfectly right about the coop space. Why is height important? I haven't run into that before; do you mind explaining it to me? I admit, I'm confused...

So we've just bought a new house in Minneapolis, and the previous owners kept poultry. I've been toying with the idea of keeping a few chickens for a couple of years now, and the itch to play with it and see if I like having them around won't go away, so... chickens. (Mostly, I want to watch...