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What if there was a magic potion to get our chickens to love us? Perhaps there is. It’s called mesotocin, the bird version of oxytocin, the so-called cuddle hormone. Oxytocin in humans is activated when we hug each other, have pleasant interactions with people, or when we pet our dog or cat...

Around the beginning of summer, people are beginning to discover they have a newly minted cockerel in their flock. Often this comes as a surprise after they were sure they had bought only pullets and suddenly one of them is behaving like a little tyrant. In truth, he’s behaving like a typical...

The last thing any chicken keeper wants to see is a favorite hen standing helplessly in a nest box with a frightening prolapse hanging out of her vent, dripping viscous fluids. Worse, she may be in the run and other chickens may have already pecked at the prolapse, literally adding insult to...

Just as school officials often overlook the importance of dealing with the victim of bullying in a school situation, we chicken folk often neglect the importance of dealing with the victim of bullying in our flocks. We get distracted by the aggression and disruption bullying causes, while the...

Diagnosing the crop disorder A hen is behaving lethargically, not eating much, if at all, but she has a full crop. This is the first sign something's not right. The full crop points to this hen having crop issues and not being sick for some other reason such as a bacterial infection, which would...

Each spring I see countless cries for help from people with a day-old baby chick who is terrorizing the other chicks in the brooder, pecking at their eyes or plucking out their down. It's automatically assumed that this is a bad “egg” and the chick is evil. It's happened to me, and it makes you...

On December 18, 2015, a friend and I embarked on a long trip of several hundred miles to pick up a two-year-old Buff Orpington hen at an animal shelter where she had been brought after a neighbor discovered her all alone and the rest of her flock dead. The owner apparently had moved and...

My early brooders Six years ago when I got my second batch of day-old baby chicks, I thought I had arrived at the ultimate solution for a brooder. I had just joined BYC and stumbled onto a thread where everyone was lamenting how scared of them their chicks were. I saw that the one thing...

Five years ago, just three weeks after bringing four new Speckled Sussex baby chicks home from the local feed store, I found one had suffered a terrible injury. The skin on the entire back of her tiny head had been neatly removed. Not just a laceration leaving a flap of skin, but she was missing...

Hi you all! I just discovered I had this page! Now I'll have to put stuff on it! More to come soon! I keep forgetting I have this space to post about life at high altitude raising chickens. Just to give you an idea of what we do on a nice-weather day in mid-January in the Rockies, here's a...