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We found this oddity on the roost this morning. We have 10 pullets who are 16-1/2 weeks old, and we haven’t seen anyone’s first egg yet. It’s time. Could this just be a start-up glitch? The coop is spacious, clean, and dry with vastly ample roost space, clean water daily, and we have just (a...

I posted yesterday about a croaky-sounding rooster (who sounds more normal today), and today I have heard a couple of my hens make sounds like coughing?! Can chickens cough? What might be up with my flock? They have a spacious, well-ventilated, dry coop and spend most of their time free ranging...

One of our roosters suddenly sounds bizarre, like he has a sore throat. His crow has gone from the , piercing, strident sound you’d expect from a rooster, to a strange croaky sound. He’s still tootling around, eating, sparring with the other roosters (gently), and all. But as the day has passed...

A 2-year-old Isa Brown has a red area below/under her vent and the vent itself looks chapped. Nothing feels swollen, hard, and nothing looks distended. The feathers look matted like she has been playing in the mud - but we don’t have that kind of mud. They have a very dry coop with puh-lenty of...

I know it’s hard to tell in very young birds, but some people have a knack or practiced eye. This bird is 4 weeks old and is a Sapphire Olive Egger from Hoover’s Hatchery. None of the photos on their website show a crest!! But this bird is surely developing a funny hairdo. Is this just normal...

I have never seen an egg like this one on the left. The one on the right is a standard, large egg laid by one of our ISA Brown chickens. The one on the left seems intact, but looks all cracked and leathery, plus it’s huge! Yesterday someone seems to have laid an egg with no shell (it looked like...

This 2-week-old chick is getting its feathers in differently than the other same-age chicks. This is a Sapphire Olive Egger, supposedly a pullet. But those feathers coming in down the ridge of its back ... the only other time I have seen this was when we had an accidental rooster. Any educated...

These are the buff/yellow babies in the hatchery brown egg layer assortment. Anyone have an eye for which fluffy yellow baby is which?

Any educated guesses on who these little fluffs might be? All are brown egg layers...

In these photos, the chick in the front is definitely a brown leghorn (ordered specifically, not part of the brown egg collection), but I don’t know who the similar one in back is. It is a brown egg layer, and the only chipmunk marked brown egg layer listed in the Hoover’s “menu” is a Cinnamon...

I have a shipment of brown egg layers from Hoover’s and I am having fun trying to puzzle out who is who. I have taken pics sort of by chick color... to narrow the field for sleuthing a little. Here are the basically black chicks. The one on the left looks more black/yellow/white, the one on the...

I'm wondering why one of my Welsummer chicks is waaaaay bigger than the other one, and significantly bigger than other chicks in my baby pen that were all hatched on the same day (this past Wednesday). I ordered pullets only, but I'm wondering if the excessively large size of that one chick...

Can just-hatched chicks drink from a nipple valve waterer? Or do they need to have a trough drinker at first? I hate the trough ones because they get so messy with poop and bedding, and I had a chick drown in one once too ...

We are having an extreme cold snap and I believe the chickens are supposed to get extra high-energy food to help them through the extreme weather. I have been doing things like spreading stale bread thickly with lard or peanut butter, then pressing that into mixed bird seed. This is in addition...

I don't usually use a heat lamp, because we have a nice coop with good ventilation, proper wide roosts, and draft protection, and that's usually fine for the ladies. But we've had a long cold spell, and we're headed into extreme cold, like -25 F and gale force winds. So in advance of that, I...

Our black Marans is just getting her feathers back in after a genuinely ugly 18-month first major molt. She had always been solid black, except for a tiny bit of white at the very tips of her tail feathers. The new feathers I see coming in have a little white dusting on EACH feather, all over...

Before we decided to get bantam chickens for pest control (and because we enjoy our chickens so much) I did a fair lot of reading to make sure we were prepared. The thing I read repeatedly was that bantam breeds are generally poor egg producers, and that I should not expect much of an increase...

We have 8 laying hens (though one has gone broody ... AGAIN ... and one seems to be on complete strike ... so really, only 6 hens who are laying eggs at this moment). We have 4 generous nesting boxes that the hens have always used with great consistency, never laying anywhere else. Now we...

We have a “repeat offender” broody hen. We let her hatch some babies in the spring, but don’t want any new ones now. I have heard of smaller confined quarters and no “nesting” spot or bedding or materials to break the broody cycle. Do you think this baby-raising coop and pen will do? It’s about...

We have a mixed flock with several breed duplicates: two silkies (one male, one female), two porcelains (both female), three Old English (two male, one female), five Golden sebright (three female, two male)... I don’t know how they know, but they absolutely group themselves by breed! They all...