Facts About Chickens

Series Summary

The Chicken is one of the most wide-spread domesticated animals. Having more than 24 billion individuals, there are more chickens on Earth than any other bird. Primarily a source of food, from both their meat and their eggs, chicken are also sometimes kept as pets. Males are known as roosters, and females hens, and together chickens form flocks. Contrary to popular belief, roosters do not only crow at dawn, since the call is a territorial sign to other roosters, they may crow at any time of day or night.

In this free video series, our expert Tia Pinney will teach you all about chickens including crested polish chickens, South American chickens, Barred Rock chickens, and Brown Leg Horn chickens. She will also give you small course in the history of agriculture before telling you about Top Hat chickens, Silver Laced Wyandotte Dot chickens, and Rhode Island Red chickens. Tia can tell why and where a hen is likely to lay her eggs, and all about chicken feed. She can even tell you about how to read the labels on the eggs you find in the supermarket and what they mean.

Video Transcript

"Today we are going to be talking about chickens. The history of chickens is the history of mankind. The chickens have been around with people probably 8 to 10,000 years. So we are going to talk about chickens, how to identify chickens, different kinds of chickens, talk about eggs, different kinds of eggs, how to read the label on an egg box, talk about how chickens eat and what they eat and all various things to do with chickens. Here at Drumlin farm we have a number of different kinds of chicken so we will identify different varieties of chickens. We have barred rocks and Road Island Reds and Silver Lace Wyandotte. We have Crested Polish, we have brown Leghorns and we have a special breed of chicken here called a Theracane developed by one of our close neighbors. "