Choosing Your Chickens
Starting off right with the best birds for your situation will help with long-term success.
Start with the right birds for the right job.
All chickens aren’t created equal. It’s important to pick the ones who will meet your needs. There are countless varieties and hundreds of breeds from which to choose. With the passage of time, humans have designed chickens to fulfill every niche: cold-hardy chickens, heat-resistant chickens, chickens that don’t mind being penned up. We haven’t designed the perfect chicken — yet! All breeds have certain failings. For those seeking to implement more natural (or even organic) husbandry practices, breed will come into a play as well.
Before you can settle on the kind of chickens to buy, you need to determine what purpose they’ll serve and what environment they’ll live in. Do you want them for their eggs? Sunday dinner? Feathery companionship? Will they spend most of their time inside or out? Will they have to contend with sweltering summer days or frigid winter nights?
Next you must decide whether you want day-old chicks or full-grown birds as well as how many to get. What advantages are there to buying a pullet rather than a chick? Is it better to start with a small flock? If you haven’t already done so, you should also find out what zoning laws may apply and how they affect your decision.
Chickens for Eggs or Meat
Birds with the greatest egg-laying capacity are not the same as those that plump up into the best candidates for the local chicken fry. Still different are the chickens that are the best choice for providing both eggs and meat. There’s a discussion to be had of the benefits and drawbacks of each breed, especially for keepers seeking a more natural approach, but all can be kept successfully, depending on your goals.
Avian Egg Machines
If you want eggs — and a whole lot of them — Mediterranean breed chickens are just your thing. Small, squawky and hyperactive, these birds mature quickly, and everything they eat goes into laying eggs. Undisputed queens of the nesting box are white Leghorns and hybrid layers based on this breed. Other impressive Mediterranean-class layers are the Minorca, Ancona, Buttercup, Andalusian and Spanish White Face.
Some chickens from other classes are laying machines, too. The Campine (Belgium), Fayoumi (Egypt), Lakenvelder (German) and Hamburg (Continental Europe) are popular examples. Like their Mediterranean sisters, they tend to be flighty, specialist hens.
Birds with the greatest egg-laying capacity are not the same as those that plump into the best meat.
Meat Chickens
These chickens (called broilers or fryers) — usually White Cornish and White Plymouth Rock hybrids — have broad, meaty breasts and white feathers, and they mature at lightning speed. Broilers are ready for the freezer in about seven weeks, and roasters (which are just larger broilers) are ready in just three more.
Be aware that because they’re hybrids, these birds don’t breed true — meaning their chicks won’t possess these stellar features. They also require careful handling; because of their abnormally wide breasts and rapid growth patterns, most become crippled as they mature.
Dual-Purpose Chickens
Dual-purpose breeds lay fewer eggs than superlayers and mature a heap slower than meat hybrids, but they’re ideal all-around hobby farm birds. They’re quieter, gentler and friendlier than the specialists, and they’re hardy and self-reliant, to boot. They are broody, so hens will set and hatch their own replacements. Nearly all lay brown eggs and are meaty enough to eat, should you wish to do so.
With a few notable exceptions, dual-purpose birds hail from the English and American classes. There are scores of interesting breeds and varieties for you to choose from.
The Little Guys
Once you’ve chosen a breed, you’ll have to decide: chicks or full-grown birds? In most cases, the correct answer is chicks. Besides getting the most for your dollar, you’ll know exactly how old they are, and when purchased from reliable sources, chicks are nearly always healthy.
Order day-old chicks from commercial or specialty hatcheries.
The former sell dozens, sometimes hundreds, of breeds and varieties of quality chicks at modest prices. For most of us, this is the logical way to fly. Specialty hatcheries are run by knowledgeable poultry aficionados who specialize in specific sorts of fowl. You’ll pay more at a specialty hatchery, but if you want to show chickens or to one day breed show-quality fowl, paying extra for specialty hatchery chicks is the way to go.
A newly hatched chick can live three days without food and water, subsisting solely on nutrients absorbed from its egg. Therefore, you can purchase chicks from hatcheries on the other side of the country, and — shipped overnight air — they should arrive safely at your nearest post office without a hitch.
However, sometimes a chick does die in transit. Thus it’s wise to order from the closest responsible source, so that your chicks needn’t travel farther than necessary. Some hatcheries will replace chickens that are dead on arrival, but others won’t. Read the guarantee before ordering chicks from a particular place. If the service is available, pay to have your chicks vaccinated for Marek’s Disease. This can only be done when they’re newly hatched, meaning it’s now or never, and it’s better to be safe.
Be aware that you can’t mail order five or six chicks. For the birds to stay warm enough in transit, a certain number of bodies must be in the shipping box, generating heat. It generally takes about twenty-five large fowl chicks or twenty-five to thirty-five bantams to do the trick. Some hatcheries allow you to order Guinea keets or other similar-size hatchlings to fill the quota. You can also find others interested in buying a few chicks and place a co-op order that will be shipped to one address.
If you don’t want to deal with roosters, buy sexed pullets. Straight-run chicks (an equal mixture of males and females) are cheaper, but at least half will be cockerels. If you can raise and butcher the excess roosters, fine. Otherwise, buy just two or three sexed roos to add to the mix — or buy none at all. Hens don’t need roosters to lay eggs.
Feed stores frequently offer day-old chicks for sale. Breed selection may be limited (mail-order chicks may be your only option if you’ve decided to buy a rare or unusual breed) and feed store chicks aren’t often sexed. However, you can choose the ones you want, buy just a few, and get them home quickly. Select bright-eyed, active chicks with straight shanks, toes and beaks, as well as clean, unobstructed bottoms. Don’t buy problems — it’s best to avoid chickies with issues.
Pre-arrival Prep
Before your chicks arrive, assemble everything you’ll need to feed, water, and brood them (keep them warm inside a heated enclosure). Have the brooder box ready and waiting.
Plan to be home the day your chicks are scheduled to arrive. In most cases, they won’t be delivered to your door; someone from the post office will call you to pick them up. When you arrive for the delivery, open the box of chicks in the presence of a postal worker who can verify your claim should any of them be dead. Then rush your new birds straight home to a cozy brooder box, water and feed. Don’t take side trips with your chicks in tow.
When you get them home, remove the chicks from their shipping box one by one and be sure to examine them thoroughly. If a chick has pasty butt — an affliction where crusty, dried droppings block a chick’s vent, making it impossible for the bird to eliminate — gently wash its little behind with a soft cloth dampened in warm water. This problem is common with mail-order chicks, especially in their first five or six days after arrival.
Check the toes. When caught early, crooked or curled toes can be splinted using wooden match sticks and strips of adhesive bandage snipped to size. Some straighten, some don’t, but
you won’t know unless you try! If a chick looks normal, dip its beak in water so the chick knows where the water is and starts drinking, and then place the bird gently under the heat source.
How Many Chickens?
The answer is a resounding “it depends.” If you’re new at chicken keeping, don’t overextend yourself. Start small and learn as you go. The downside to this advice is that adding new birds to an established flock upsets its pecking order and spawns stress. Overall, it’s better for your birds to hatch out a new hierarchy than for you to bite off more than you can chew.
By the same token, if you’re experienced or you’re certain about how many you want to keep, you’ll save your chickens a lot of stressful infighting — and possibly disease — by buying all the birds you need up front and then maintaining a closed flock until you start back at square one again.
Unless you can spend a lot of quality time with a pet chicken (as you might with a house chicken), buy at least two. Chickens are sociable; a solitary cock or hen will be lonely.
You should also buy at least one layer hen per family member, more if your family eats lots of eggs or if you choose a dual-purpose breed. If you plan to maintain a closed flock (meaning you don’t add new adult chickens to an established flock — a wise decision), you should allow for several years’ flock mortality. To do this, purchase 10 to 20 percent more chicks than you initially think you’ll need. Of course, don’t buy more birds than you can properly house.
Sue Weaver has written hundreds of articles, including those for Hobby Farms magazine and Chickens magazine, and nine books about livestock and poultry. She lives on a small farm in Arkansas, where she cares for sheep, goats, horses and, of course, chickens.