Beginners Guide to Chickens: Basic information

To seriously begin thinking about whether or not to have chickens, you need to consider a number of options. First, do you have local support/permission? Only then can you start to consider whether you have enough space and budget for a suitably sized coop and birds.

If you read the newspapers and believe them, 'back-yard' chicken-keeping is at an all time high - or at least since WW2. As I live in the country, I haven't seen any difference, in fact, locally, many people have given up trying to keep chickens as they can get incredibly cheap eggs from the supermarket without having to clean out a coop every day.

I can understand why they do this, as keeping chickens is not a cheap option of getting eggs. It's a hobby; it's enjoyable; it's a conversation piece; it's not cheap, but chicken fanciers think it's worth it. When you've spent time picking and purchasing a coop, setting it up, buying or acquiring your chickens and establishing a flock; the sense of pride is immense when that first egg appears. The trick is to make sure you get more than one egg, so the return on your investment isn't the cost of the coop, food and hens for a single egg worth 25p.

So, we don't need to keep chickens to get cheap eggs, which is lucky as you will probably have months without getting any eggs at all. The little buggers will happily chomp their way through your carefully selected layers pellets - designed specifically to give your hens the best nutrition to lay eggs - but no eggs appear. This could be for a number of reasons:

1. Your chickens are too young, too old or badly bred.
   
   Hens start to lay at approx 5 to 6 months old and may lay for years. However, they lay sporadically when they are coming into maturity and going into old age. I have one chicken, Ava, who has laid eggs in the summer, but unlike her prolific companion, Grace, has only laid a few useless soft shelled eggs for the last three months. Both chickens have the same diet and supplements, but she just can't get a decent egg out. I have finally decided that this must be down to bad breeding, which I can do nothing about. Many people keep under-performing hens despite the lack of eggs as they've grown attached to them. Understandable, but this means you are feeding hens for no output. At this stage you are keeping them as a pet. I'm not sure I like Ava enough to keep her, so I have a daily internal discussion about whether today is the day she goes 'to see the farmer'. So far, she's winning.
   
   
2. The breed of the chicken is not a heavy-laying type.
   
   There are a multitude of chickens that are pretty-looking (Orpington), unusual (Silkies), or that lay pastel coloured eggs (Arucana). Generally speaking, the prettier breeds are not great on laying an egg a day over a sustained period. Grace, my Light Sussex, has laid 29 eggs in every month since she matured into laying as her breed has been bred to lay up to 300 eggs a year. A specialised breed could lay no more than a dozen eggs a year, or none at all - depending on the quality of its' breeding. I had a beautiful blue Brahma hen who never laid an egg and died young; which is always sad.
   
   If you are looking for a good layer, the Rhode Island Red or Sussex breeds are both excellent and easy to find in rural 'Fur and Feather Auctions', or through breeders that can be found online.
   
   
3. The chicken has been traumatised.
   
   My blue Brahma hen was unfortunate enough to be chased twice by a neighbours small dog that had escaped from its' garden. It was as if her spirit had been broken and she simply faded away. Incredibly sad, and quite common in the larger or over-bred specialist breeds. They are a bit like owning a race-horse - highly strung. Even a 'hardy' breed will suffer if there is a fox or dog attack, but they will recover quicker. How long is up to them, but I've had chickens seemingly die of shock and others who just kept on laying the following day. Amazingly, and despite their breed, each chicken reacts individually.
   
   
4. Your hen is broody.
   
   My beloved bantam Maran, Ken the hen, is a typical broody. Even at 3 years old, she will lay a dozen eggs and then go broody. At this point, if the eggs could be fertile from one of the cockerels, I will pop a couple underneath her and let her get on with it. In 20-24 days, if I'm lucky, a couple of little chicks hatch out. If you don't have a cockerel, then your hen going broody is a waste of both your time. She will sit in the coop or in a nest somewhere else and stubbornly remain there until it finally occurs to her that there are no eggs underneath her. She can't help it - she's just following a hundred million year-old chemical instruction to keep the species going.
   
   The best cure for broodiness? Chuck her out of the nest and deny her access. She'll shout at you for a few days, but eventually she'll give up and go back into a laying phase again - until the cycle starts all over again. I use my broody to hatch out other fertilised eggs - such as George and Grace's. A broody isn't fussy over what eggs she sits on - she's just glad to have some eggs to fuss over.
   
   
5. Your chicken is a cockerel. Seriously. It's easy to get confused when you first start out. I'll write more about this in a later section. But a quick solution is to either eat them or sell them at a Fur and Feather Auction.

So what sort of flock do you want?

Taking these laying factors into account, you can start to think about what sort of flock you want. Do you want a pretty flock of little Silkies that won't make too much mess and will be good with children? Do you want to have occasional eggs in pretty colours? Or do you want to lay enough eggs to feed your family?  You can mix your breeds, as I have done, to get a combination of pretty and utilitarian hard core egg-layers. You can choose to re-home ex-battery hens and you can even choose to do without a cockerel. The chances are that when people hear that you are setting up a flock, people will try to donate their unwanted hens and cockerels, so beware of what you are saying 'yes' to and beware of falling in love with unsuitable chickens that will not help you to achieve the balance in the flock that you are trying to achieve.

It's a heck of a lot easier to get a chook than to get rid of a chook.

To cockerel or not to cockerel?

No, you don't have to have a noisy, food-gobbling cockerel in your flock. In many urban areas cockerels are  banned, so it's lucky for us that a hen doesn't need a cockerel to lay an egg. I'll say that again:

A hen can lay eggs without a cockerel.

In my experience, a flock of hens is a much more argumentative place without a cockerel. They naturally establish a pecking order to create the alpha female, but the process is far less aggressive if an alpha male is in attendance. My various hens have been happier and more content with a cockerel present - and happier hens lay more eggs; well, allegedly.

Personally, I love cockerels. They're noisy, eat loads of food and don't contribute to the household food supply, unless you rear them deliberately for the pot, but they do protect the hens in a gentlemanly manner; they do find them food and cluck to call them over to it - all of which I find endlessly amusing and very sweet.

If you see a bird that's stands regally and has beautifully groomed feathers shining in a dazzling array of colours - that's a cockerel - overseeing his domain and looking damn fine whilst doing it. They're just so, well, eighteenth century dandy. A beautiful sight to behold and a pain in the ass at 5am in the Summer. Cock-a-ruddy-doodle-do. Anyway, don't say I didn't warn you!