Chickens in Your Backyard, Newly Revised and Updated: A Beginner's Guide (Rodale Classics) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

CHICKENS IN YOUR BACKYARD
A BEGINNER'S GUIDE
Rick and Gail Luttmann

Your backyard can be the source of the best eggs and meat you've ever tasted. The answer is chickens-- endearing birds that require but a modest outlay of time, space and food.

As they learned to raise chickens, Gail and Rick Luttmann came to realize the need for a comprehensive but clear and nontechnical guide. Their book covers all the basics in a light and entertaining sytle, from housing and feeding through incubating, bringing up chicks, butchering, and raising chickens for show.

Througout the book, the Luttmanns express their wonder at the personalities of chickens-- the role of brash protector played by roosters, and the instinctive motherliness of the hens. Given some freedom and attention, these birds can become much more than the egg-and-meat machines of commercial hatcheries and broiler factories. Chickens provide backyard farmers with enjoyable pastime, as well as a supply of good food.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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 breed and variety—color, weight, shape, feathering, and so forth. Both large and bantam breeds are described in the American Standard of Perfection, a periodically updated book published by the American Poultry Association, and bantam breeds are additionally described in the Bantam Standard, published by the American Bantam Association. If you show your chickens, the extent to which they conform to their breed’s standard description determines the prizes that they are awarded.

A standard or standard-bred chicken is any one described in either of these two books. The word “standard” is sometimes used incorrectly to refer to large-size chickens, as opposed to bantams.

The polite word for chicken excrement is droppings, also known as chicken poop. The polite word for the opening it comes out of is the vent, which also happens to be the same opening eggs come out of. Some of our friends find this fact appalling. (We refer them to the Manufacturer.) The eggs come along a different track, however, known as the oviduct. Just in front of the vent on the underside of the chicken are two sharp, pointed pubic bones coming back from the breastbone. By checking the distance between the pubic bones, you can tell how well a hen is laying.

Chickens don’t have teeth. Whatever a chicken eats goes into a little pouch at the base of its neck called a crop, which usually bulges by the end of the day. The crop’s contents are gradually released into the gizzard, which is essentially a sack of gravel and other small, hard objects that grind up everything to make it easier to digest. The grinding agent is called grit. If your chickens can’t find grit naturally, in the form of sand or small pebbles pecked from your yard, you can purchase gravel grit at the feed store. (We are occasionally asked if chicken grit is the same product as grits sold at the grocery store. It isn’t.)

Along with other types of chicken rations sold at a feed store is scratch, which consists of a mixture of corn and various grains. Scratch is not a nutritionally complete chicken feed. Think of it as candy for your feathered friends.

The part of a chicken’s leg from the foot to the first joint is the shank. It is usually naked and scaly, but in some breeds, feathers grow all the way to the ground. Spurs are the sharp, horny protrusions on a cock’s shank, which he uses to protect himself when he feels threatened. Their length and condition give you a rough idea of the cock’s age. Hens sometimes grow spurs, but they’re rarely as formidable as a rooster’s. The superstructure on a chicken’s head is a comb, and the dangly things under the chin are wattles.

The words “mate” and “breed” are not quite synonymous. Mating refers to the forming of an allegiance between a male and a female, or sometimes a male and several females. Mated birds hang around together and have more social interaction with each other than with the rest of the flock. Wild birds tend to form strong matings, sometimes seasonal, sometimes for life. Chickens exhibit this behavior only mildly, in that a rooster usually tries to gather a harem of hens to supervise.

Breeding refers specifically to the performance of the sexual act. This word is also used in another sense—to refer to the genetic control exercised by a keeper to ensure that offspring are produced only by certain selective pairs of birds. Confusing these two meanings of the word can be rude, especially when you are talking to a chicken breeder.

The chickens you own are sometimes called your stock. If you save certain chickens specifically for breeding, they are called your breeding stock or your breeders. If you have excellent specimens of chickens suitable for exhibition, they are called show stock or show quality (abbreviated SQ). Those not of show quality (NSQ) are pet quality (PQ).

Serious breeders, and those who keep hens for economical egg production, periodically examine their chickens and...