Most soon-to-be chicken keepers learn all they can before bringing home that peeping box of fluffy chicks. Studying up on all the chicken information out there is essential to being prepared for this great new adventure.
Before we brought home our chicks, we researched for months. We’d read every book we could get our hands on and scoured websites for information. We knew all the fun chicken facts. We thought we knew everything there was to know about chickens.
We were wrong.
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Chicken Information: 10 Fun Tidbits for You to Know
1. Fellow chicken lovers pop up out of nowhere
One bit of chicken information we were totally not expecting when we started raising chickens was the number of other people who quickly become obsessed with our flock!
Our friends and family quickly learned the names of all our chickens and asked about the frequently. They would always tag me in funny chicken videos and chicken memes on Facebook.
Acquaintances I hardly knew would email me asking for advice on starting their own flock, and before I knew it, I was encouraging everyone I knew to get their own chickens!
Chickens have a funny way of forming a community of fellow animal lovers, and quickly!
2. Chicken math is real
There’s a hilarious term in the chicken keeping community called chicken math, where no matter how good you are at counting, your chickens seem to mysteriously multiply at every moment.
When you start loving chickens, the opportunities to get more seem to pop up out of nowhere. Someone’s hen needs a new home, there’s a stray chicken found in your town, the bin of freshly hatched chicks at Tractor Supply is calling your name, or you just want to try your hand at hatching your own.
There’s no shortage of ways to get new chickens into your life, and you won’t want to stop until you have them all!
I mean, there are chickens that lay colorful eggs! Gotta have a few of those too, right?
3. Chickens will destroy your garden at every chance
Our first summer with chickens, we let them free-range constantly. By the end of the summer every bit of grass in our yard had been devoured and the only survivors in our garden were the hedges and trees, and even they were suffering.
Chickens naturally love to scratch at soil in search of bugs and seeds. Don’t let this factor deter you from getting a flock of backyard chickens, you can do several things to keep them from destroying your property.
4. Chickens Make Wonderful Pets
Before we started raising chickens, we never knew how big their personalities are, and how cuddly they can be.
These little rascals really grow on you, and you’ll find that they adore you just as much as you adore them!
Chickens are great pets that will sit on your lap, come when called (as long as you bribe them with treats) and follow you around when you do your chores.
5. The Chicken Keeping Community is Amazing
When we first started raising chickens, finding chicken information was rough. But finding community was even rougher.
In fact, there wasn’t much of a community to speak of. That’s part of the reason we created this website!
Over the years, as chicken keeping has grown in popularity, so has the worldwide group of chicken lovers who want to share that love with others.
Our Facebook group is growing by the day, and our Instagram community has us smiling everyday.
It’s so wonderful to have a huge group of fellow chicken lovers to turn to when you need help, comfort, or just want to share a picture of your flock!
6. They put themselves to bed at night
One of the most fascinating bits of chicken information is they naturally return to the coop every evening after a day of free- ranging.
We constantly get asked, “how do you wrangle them all up when you want to put them back in the coop?” and we always answer that we don’t have to, they do it themselves!
Chickens quickly learn that the coop is their home and is the best place to keep them safe. In nature, chickens return to the same roosts night after night, and this instinct translates to captive chickens as well.
We always keep the coop door open while the hens free-range so when the skies start to get dark, they can march right back into the coop for bed.
7. You’ll spoil them rotten
Once you come to love chickens, it’s hard not to show them your love every chance you get.
You’ll find yourself spending more money on their chicken treats than you would on your own treats!
You’ll start spending all your spare time hanging out with them in the backyard and giving them cuddles.
You may even go so crazy with the spoiling that you start to dream of buying them the fanciest, most badass chicken coop on the market!
8. They Are Loud
Some think the only chickens that are loud are roosters, which is unfortunately not true at all.
All chickens can stir up quite the racket, although some breeds are louder than others.
Chickens love to join in a chorus of the egg song when one of them lays an egg. This singing is delightful and welcome to the chicken keeper, but to neighbors, not so much.
9. They can help you with the compost
Many people don’t understand that chickens are omnivores.
In nature, chickens not only eat vegetation like grass, weeds, and flowers, they also eat meat! Chickens will catch and eat mice, frogs, and bugs for a boost of protein and nutrition.
In reality, there are so many things that chickens will eat!
This can be such a boon for you if you’re a homesteader who likes to compost. Chickens will gladly help you to get rid of unwanted leftovers, and will turn it into lovely manure for your garden. Just make sure you let it age for a year before using it!
10. You’ll become a crazy chicken person
It won’t be long into your chicken keeping journey that you’ll find yourself becoming a crazy chicken person. It may start innocently enough, where you just find yourself spending a lot of time talking to them and taking photos of them to share on Instagram.
But before long, you’ll be shopping for chicken shirts, dreaming of adding more chickens to your flock, and talking about them at every moment.
The good news is, you’re in good company. We’re all crazy chicken people here, and we’re all ready to share our love with you!
