hello yes chickens are cool and i love them

/biologist answer

Because they evolved from an ancestor that had a four-limb bodyplan. Successfully creating a whole new set of limbs, having them work with the body systems already there + be advantageous enough to stick around in a population is very unlikely.

 

Just dropping into this thread to say that I love chickens with all my heart and it makes me sad that I'm not allowed them where I live :(

Insofar as fav breeds go, I think mine's probably the Australorp and those lace Wyandottes - the lineart chickens XD But if I ever did get chooks myself I'd probably start off with a few ex-battery hens - they're still good layers, just not up to commercial standard, and if anyone deserves a nice retirement those poor buggers certainly do.

We had a small flock - I think around five or six - ex-batts at the Ground Studies College I did my animal care course at. Students being inner-city students, they all names like Tikka, Masala, KFC, Coq au Van... XD But they were awesome. They weren't super cuddly, but they tolerated being picked up and poked at for health checks, and Red, the leader... you looked in her eyes and you could absolutely see that there was still a theropod dinosaur in there.

They were a tough bunch of girls and I loved them - once I saw them chase down and peck a rat to death that had come into their yard trying to steal their feed XD

 

Cream Brabanters! [X]

 

excuse me that's clearly a pokemon

 

Good news! Neighbor found V -bird trying to integrate with her flock. Hilariously, this is the same neighbor who's Australorp tried to join my flock during the summer. Our birds are trying to set up some kind of exchange program.

(Still want to know who fucked with my run and coop tho.)

 

Chickens are amazing birds. We had 6 at one time, sadly are now down to one due to old age taking a toll. It was funny how well trained they were though. If you opened the cage door they would come running in to get pets and sneak a treat if you had any.

The best part though was whenever dad mowed the yard they would come up to their fence and wait for him to come by and cover them with grass clippings. Then they would spend the rest of the day digging though it for bugs.

 

so my nana took in two girls when she was younger since they had really bad home lives, an one of them has a little girl, and they keep chickens, and this like 14 year old has her chickens and she adores them and that's really cute

also i wanna hold a chicken. it's on my bucket list

 

Oh gosh, all these chickens are pretty! It's making me wish I could have some chickens. Sadly, I am badly allergic to feathers (I break out into hives), so I think I'll have to keep to looking longingly at the photos and being happy that someone gets to have pretty, friendly chickens.

 

Mom brought over 2 huge bags of leaves from her property and I dumped themin the run. Chickens are quite happily scratch-a-scratchin' away at their new awesome leaf pile lookin' for bugs.

 

Are there actually a lot of bugs to be found in piles of leaves and grass or is it just something to keep their tiny brains engaged so they don't get bored/stressed and peck each other to death?

 

Both! Especially now when winter's coming on, piles of leaves are where the bugs like to hibernate. Also, chickens love to eat the grass clippings themselves.

 

Im glad omg, Chicken Enrichment, thats really cute

 

Even when they have the whole yard to scratch in, my flock will make make a beeline for the piles of leaves in the cover of the yard under the maples. So many neat things to discover and eat!

 

If it helps I can describe the experience - they're very warm, and very smooth and soft, but not as fluffy as you think. Also much lighter than a mammal of the same size, so sometimes it feels like holding a cloud.

And unless you are super good friends with the hen in question she will give you a Jurassic Park- level baleful stare until you feel intimidated and put her down again.

Sidenote, I found out the other day that it seems like it's an only-australian thing to call them chooks, which seems weird to me. It's the noise they make! Why would you not call them by that? They go chooook-chook--chook-chuk not chick-chick-chick XD

Also I should add another thing about the flock at my Land Studies college - near the end of my time there, we adopted a tiny little bantam rooster (not sure of his exact breed). He was about a quarter of the size of the girls, but he made up for it by being LOUD XD

Seriously, I wanted earplugs if I went anywhere near his indoor run and the girls were awake - if he could hear them choook-ing to each other, he YELLED. (We were keeping them seperate for the time just because our girls were so uninclined to tolerate bullshit from anything smaller than them we feared they might straight-up murder him if he was just allowed to mingle unsupervised before they were used to the sound of his voice XD)

 

I actually make that sound to call them over! "Choooooook-chookchookchookchookchookchook-CHICKEN!" It's funny to watch them all hustle to me, they've been trained to know this is the Treat Call.

 

In Dutch they do: pooook-pok-pok-pok-pok, pooook-pok-pok-pok-pok where the 'o' sound is more like 'ohhhh'

 

Here's a video I took this summer of Rose doing her I Have A Complaint I Wish To File With The Management schtick.

 

One of our girls laid an egg! Theyre all bantams so its a smol brown egg, and it makes me really happy c: what makes me less happy is that the two boys are squabbling, probably bc the girls are just becoming mature. Weve had the pair of boys for about two years now and the girls for one, and they were all so good up until now :ccc

 

they'll usually work out a pecking order. Roosters don't generally want to kill each other, the people that do cock fighting train them into it (and do shit like sharpen the spurs). If they squabble too much, you can always add more hens (provided you have the room).

 

Oh i know theyll work themselves out eventually, im just a little disappointed that they're fighting at all since they were such good buddies until now. We probably will get more hens in the spring though, since we've only got the three and did not have any issue with raccoons this year.