All the basics (and beyond!) for happy, healthy chickens. In cities and suburbs and everywhere in between, a classic American tradition is back in a big way—raising backyard chickens for eggs, meat, fun, or profit. Chickens in Your Backyard has been the go-to guide for chicken care for over 40 years. This revised and updatededition combines all the classic techniques with the most up-to-date information—from incubating, raising, housing, and feeding, to treating disease and raising chickens for show. Chickens in Your Backyard provides everything you need to know to turn your backyard into a happy homestead. Gail Damerow and her husband operate a family farm in Tennessee where they keep poultry and dairy goats, tend a sizable garden, and maintain a small orchard. They grow and preserve much of their own food, make their own yogurt and ice cream, and bake their own bread. Gail has written extensively on raising livestock, growing fruits and vegetables, and related rural skills. She shares her experience and knowledge as a regular contributor to Backyard Poultry and Countryside magazines, as an occasional contributor to numerous other periodicals, and as the author or contributor to more than a dozen country skills how-to books. Chapter 1 Words You Should Know A number of words are peculiar to the language of poultry-raising. Knowing and understanding these words will help you communicate with other people about chickens, especially when a word possesses a different or more precise meaning than it has in common usage. This chapter is intended as a reference both when unfamiliar words come up in your conversations with other poultry people and when these words occur in later chapters. This chapter serves as something of a glossary, with explanations developed more fully later on. A bunch of chickens is officially called a flock. Chicken means a specific kind of bird, but it does not tell you the bird’s sex. An adult female chicken is a hen, and an adult male is a cock or a rooster. Some folks just shorten it to roo. A male chicken younger than 1 year is a cockerel, and a female chicken under 1 year is a pullet. (Don’t confuse this word with poult, which is a baby turkey and has nothing to do with this book). A baby chicken of either sex is a chick. The sound a chick makes is a peep, and you’ll sometimes see “peep” applied to the chick itself. Chickens venture forth during the daytime, but they always return to the same place to sleep at night. This habit is called roosting, and the place they return to is the roost. Chickens like to sleep on something off the ground, like a tree branch or a ladder rung, which is referred to as a perch. Anytime a bird is sitting on such a thing, whether it is sleeping or not, it is perching. Chickens come in two basic sizes: large and bantam (affectionately called banty). Bantams are not a separate breed or species; they are simply small chickens. Some bantams have large counterparts; others do not. Those that do not are true bantams. Those that do are miniatures, although they are not exact miniatures—the size of their heads, tails, wings, feathers, and eggs is larger than would be the case if they were perfect miniatures. Chickens, like horses and dogs, come in different breeds. Purebreds are those of one single breed sharing distinguishing characteristics that make them all alike. Since no organization registers chickens, purists take exception to the use of the word “purebred,” preferring straightbred. Hybrid-crosses, or crossbreeds, are developed for certain outstanding characteristics and are produced by always mating chickens of the same two different breeds. A chicken of mixed breed, often of unknown ancestry—a mutt of the chicken world—is a barnyard chicken or barny. To confuse the issue, however, when “barny” is capitalized, it refers to a specific breed, the Barnevelder. Chickens that are purebred will breed true, which means that the offspring of a pair of chickens of the same breed will also be of the same breed and will, more or less, have the same characteristics. Barnies of indeterminate origin, and to a limited extent deliberately developed hybrids and crossbreeds, will have offspring with wild conglomerations of characteristics that can rarely be predicted accurately (but can be quite spectacular). Pure breeds are grouped into different classifications, which usually tell the place of origin. Some classifications are Asiatic, American, and Mediterranean. Rhode Island Red is one of the breeds within the American classification, for example, and Leghorn is a breed within the Mediterranean classification. Breeds themselves are further organized into varieties, which tell more about the chickens’ appearances. Brown Leghorn and white Leghorn are two varieties of the Leghorn breed. (Incidentally, Leghorn is pronounced LEG-ern, not LEG-horn.) The Standard, with a capital S, refers to either of two books that describe the appearance of each br