Sue Weaver - Chickens: Tending a Small-Scale Flock

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Book:
Chickens: Tending a Small-Scale Flock
Author:
Sue Weaver
Publisher:
CompanionHouse Books
Genre:
Books / Detective and thriller
Year:
2011
Rating:
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Hobby Farms Chickens: Tending a Small-Scale Flock for Pleasure and Profit is geared toward the hobby farmer looking to begin his or her own flock of chickens on a small farm or even backyard. Author Sue Weaver, who keeps various exotic breeds and countless barnies on her farm, is an expert on all things livestock and an avowed chicken fanatic. This photo-filled guide begins with Chickens 101 and details the physiology of chickens, members of the Phasianidea family, providing beginning hobby farmers with a basic education in the chickens unique physical makeup (from wings and feathers to beaks and digestive tracts), behavior, mating, and its unexpected high intelligence. The author offers advice on choosing the right types of chickens to get started: meat, egg, or dual purpose, or maybe even just for pets. The book is an excellent resource for selecting which breed of chicken is best for the hobby farmer, based on the birds traits, such as aggression, personality, noise factor, tolerance for heat, confinement, cold, etc. Chickens also provides information on selecting or building a suitable chicken coop for the hobby farmers brood, outlining the basic requirements (lighting, ventilation, flooring, waterers, insulation, safety, and so forth). A detailed chapter on feeding chickens offers essential guidance on nutrition, commercial feeds, supplements, and water requirements. For the chicken hobby farmer looking to start with a clutch of baby chicks (from his own hen or an outside source), the author provides excellent info on incubators and hatching as well as all of the accommodations and preparation required for hens in the nest box. A chapter on selling eggs and broilers provides timetables, requirements, and dos and donts to get a hobby farmers business off on the right foot. All chicken keepers will find the chapter on health of particular value, with expert advice on preventing common problems and dealing various maladies and diseases. Much detailed information about all of the topics in the book is encapsulated in sidebars. A glossary of over 125 terms plus a detailed resource section of chicken and poultry associations, books, and websites complete the volume. Fully indexed.

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Table of Contents

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the wonderful folks at the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy for saving our heritage fowl and to David Puthoff for introducing me to Buckeye chickens.

INTRODUCTION

Why Chickens?

Seventy years ago, throughout the countryside and in cities large and small, backyard chicken coops were the norm. Chickens furnished table meat and eggs; most everyone kept at least a few hens. Years passed and attitudes shifted; small-scale chicken keeping became gauche. By the end of the twentieth century, while agri-biz egg and meat producers, immigrants, rustics, and aging hippies were keeping chickens, cultivated urban and suburbanites were not!

The times they are a-changin once again. As our world becomes increasingly frenetic, violent, and stressful, a burgeoning number of Americans are seeking a quieter existence. Well move to the country, some decide. Well live on a small farm and commute or work from home; well garden... well have chickens!

Nowadays, from Minneapolis to New Orleans, from Los Angeles to New York City and all points in-between, throngs of city dwellers and suburbanites raise and praise the chicken. A few miles farther out, more hobby farmers are apt to raise chickens than any other farmyard bird or beast. Hens are the critter du jour.

Why keep chickens? For their eggs, of course, and (for those who eat them) their healthier-than-red-meat flesh, whether strictly for your own table or for profit, as well. Chickens are easy to care for, and you neednt break the bank to buy, house, and feed them. You may also wish, like many hobby farmers, to keep livestock for fun and relaxation. Surprisingly, chickens make unique, affectionate pets. They offer a link to gentler times; theyre good for the soul. Its relaxing (and fascinating) to hunker down and observe them.

This book is meant to educate and entertain rookie and chicken maven alike. Are you with me? Then lets talk chickens!

Chapter ONE

Chickens 101

Domestic chickens belong to the Phasianidae family, as do quail, grouse, partridges, pheasants, turkeys, snowcocks, spurfowl, monals, peafowl, and jungle fowl. Domestic chickens are descendants of the Southeast Asian Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus, also called Gallus bankiva), which emerged as a species roughly 8,000 years ago. Today Red Jungle Fowl have disappeared from most parts of Southeast Asia and the Philippines, but a genetically pure population still exists in measured numbers in the dense jungles of northeastern India. In Latin, gallus means comb, and that is how chickens differ from their Phasianidae cousins. While chickens vary widely in shape and size, all have traits in common, including general physiology, behavior, and level of intelligence.

Physiology

Chickens see in color; their visual acuity is about the same as a humans. While they dont have external ears, they do have external auditory meatuses (ear canals) and hear quite well. Their frequency range corresponds to ours. Their smell is poorly developed, and they dont taste sweets. They do, however, easily detect salt in their diets. Other important physiological characteristics to be aware of concern the digestive tract, internal and external structure (bones, muscles, skin, feathers), and sexual characteristics.

Digestive Tract

Chickens have no teeth. Instead, whole food moves down the esophagus and into the crop, a highly expandable storage compartment that allows a chicken to pack away considerable amounts of food at a time. When packed, its externally visible as a bulge at the base of the neck. Unchewed food trickles from the crop into the birds proventriculus (the true stomach), then to the ventriculous (another stomach, more commonly called the gizzard) to be macerated and mixed with gastric juice from the proventriculus. The food finally passes to the small intestine, where nutrients are absorbed, and then to the large intestine where water is extracted. From there it moves to the cloacathe chamber inside the chickens vent (where its digestive, excretory, and reproductive tracts meet via the fecal chamber)and finally out the vent. Food processing time for a healthy chicken is roughly three to four hours. Urine (the white component of chicken droppings) also exits the cloaca, but via the urogenital chamber.

Chickens at a Glance Kingdom Animalia Phylum Chordata Class Aves - photo 6

Chickens at a Glance
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Galliformes
Family:	Phasianidae
Genus:	Gallus
Species:	Gallus domesticus

Bones to Feathers

While chickens have largely lost the ability to fly, some of their bones are hollow (pneumatic) and contain air sacs. Smaller fowl can fly into trees and over fences; when harried, heavy breeds try but usually arent able to get airborne. Chicken muscles are composed of lightcolor (white meat) and red (dark meat) fibers. Light muscle occurs mainly in the breast; dark muscle occurs in the chickens legs, thighs, back, and neck. Wings contain both light and dark fibers.

Skin pigmentation varies by breed (it can be yellow, white, or black). Its exact hue is influenced by what an individual bird eats and sometimes by whether a hen is laying eggs. When a yellow-skinned hen begins laying eggs, skin on various body parts bleaches lighter in a given order (vent, eye ring, ear lobe, beak, soles of feet, shanks). When she stops, color returns in the exact reverse order.

Domestication and Cockfighting

Before chickens, there was the Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus gallus), a flashy, chickenlike bird native to the forests and thickets of Southeast Asia. As a species, it emerged between 6000 and 5000 BC. By 4000 BC, Gallus gallus was domesticatednot for food but for cockfighting. By 3200 BC, high-caste Indian aristocrats were fighting cocks that resemble todays Aseel chickens. Chickensand cockfightingspread in the following centuries as traders carried domesticated birds, or chickens, farther and farther throughout the ancient world.

When Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III embarked on his 1464 BC Asiatic campaign, he was presented with fighting stock as tribute. The first known depiction of domestic fowla fighting cockis etched on a pottery shard of that period. Cockfighting became the rage in Athens around 600 BC and was an event at early Olympic games. Greek cockfighters passed the baton to ancient Rome. An avid cocker, Julius Caesar was pleased to find the sport already established in Britain when his army invaded the island in 55 and 54 BC.

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