So you think you want chickens. Excellent. I'm a terrible person to talk you out of it because I happen to think chickens are pretty damn fantastic. But before you come home with a box of fluffy chicks and start picking names, there are a few things you should know.
And if the reason you're considering chickens is because you looked at the price of eggs and thought, “Screw this, I'll just raise my own,” I have some unfortunate news for you. By the time you've bought or built a coop, predator-proofed the run, bought feeders, waterers, feed, bedding, a brooder and heat source if you're starting with chicks, and all the other crap you didn't know you needed until you owned chickens, those first eggs may be some of the most expensive eggs you've ever eaten.
Get chickens because you want chickens. The eggs are a really nice bonus.
First, Make Sure You Can Actually Have Chickens
Before you buy a single chick, check your local laws and any rules that apply to your property. Depending on where you live, there may be limits on how many chickens you can keep, where the coop can be located, or whether you're allowed to have roosters. If you rent or live somewhere with an HOA, there may be another set of rules to deal with too.
And if you've already checked and discovered that you aren't allowed to have chickens, don't convince yourself that you'll just get pullets and nobody will ever know because hens are quiet.
You clearly haven't met enough hens.
Roosters get most of the attention when people talk about chicken noise, but hens are absolutely not silent. They squabble. They complain. They yell when another hen is occupying the nest box they have personally decided is the only acceptable nest box in a coop containing six identical ones. And then there's the egg song, when a hen announces to herself, the rest of the flock, your neighbors, and possibly three surrounding zip codes that THERE HAS BEEN AN EGG.
Some hens are quieter than others, and a flock of hens is generally a different noise situation than keeping a crowing rooster. But “pullets only” is not a stealth chicken operation.
Do this before you buy the chickens, not after. Feed stores don't check your zoning ordinances before selling you six adorable little fluffballs, and “But the feed store let me buy them” probably isn't going to impress whoever handles code enforcement in your town. And don't assume that because your neighbor has chickens, you're allowed to have them too. Check for yourself.
Decide How You Want to Start Your Flock
You don't have to start with day-old chicks. Depending on what you want, you can buy chicks, started pullets, adult birds, or hatching eggs. They all come with different advantages, disadvantages, costs, and levels of chaos.
Chicks are adorable and give you the experience of raising your flock from babies, but they need a brooder, supplemental heat, chick starter, and more hands-on care while they're young. Started pullets cost more, but somebody else has already handled the tiny-baby stage and you're closer to getting eggs. Adult birds can be a good option too, especially if you find birds that need a new home and are a good fit for your flock.
Hatching your own eggs is an entirely different adventure. You'll need an incubator or a broody hen, and not every fertile egg will necessarily hatch. Unless you're working with an autosexing breed or a sex-linked cross where sex can reliably be determined at hatch, you also won't know how many males and females you're getting.
Hatching is incredibly fun. It's also a really efficient way to manufacture roosters.
Chickens Need Other Chickens
Chickens are flock animals, so don't plan on getting one chicken and expecting her to be perfectly happy hanging out with you and the family dog. Human attention isn't a substitute for having other chickens around.
I prefer starting with enough birds that you still have a small flock if something happens to one. Exactly how many chickens make sense depends on your space, local laws, housing, and what you're hoping to get from your flock. Just remember that every adorable chick you bring home is going to become a full-sized chicken that needs room.
Chicken math has consequences.
Have a Rooster Plan Before You Need a Rooster Plan
If you hatch eggs or buy straight-run chicks, expect roosters. Over a large enough group, the sex ratio tends toward roughly half male and half female, although your particular hatch can laugh directly in the face of statistics and give you whatever the hell it wants. Even chicks sold as pullets aren't always a guarantee, depending on the breed and how they were sexed. Mistakes happen.
Before you bring chicks home, decide what you'll do with males you can't or don't want to keep. Maybe you can keep a rooster. Maybe you want a bachelor flock. Maybe you'll responsibly rehome them. Maybe processing excess males for food fits your household or farm. Whatever your answer is, figure it out before somebody crows.
Hope is not a rooster plan.
Build the Coop Before the Chickens Need It
Chicks grow ridiculously fast. That cute little brooder that looks enormous when they're three days old can start looking like rush hour traffic before you're emotionally prepared for it. Have your adult housing planned before the birds come home. Better yet, have it built.
Your chickens need enough room to move around comfortably, roost, eat, drink, and get away from each other when necessary. Hens need appropriate nesting areas. The coop needs ventilation without creating a drafty wind tunnel, and the whole setup needs to be something you can actually clean without inventing new swear words every Saturday morning.
If you're building the coop yourself, assume it will take longer and cost more than you think. There. I just saved you a trip to the hardware store.
Actually, no I didn't. Nothing can save you from the extra trip to the hardware store.
Predator Protection Is Not Optional
Everybody wants to eat chicken. Unfortunately, I'm not just talking about people.
What you're protecting against depends on where you live, but raccoons, foxes, coyotes, dogs, weasels, mink, snakes, hawks, owls, and other predators can all cause problems. Some dig. Some climb. Some fly. Some can reach through openings. Raccoons have tiny little criminal hands and entirely too much time to figure out your coop.
Chicken wire is great for keeping chickens in. It isn't necessarily enough to keep determined predators out. For areas where predator resistance matters, I rely on appropriately sized hardware cloth and secure construction rather than assuming flimsy wire will protect the flock. Think about doors, windows, vents, rooflines, gaps, latches, and the perimeter of the run.
If you free-range your birds, understand that you're accepting additional predator risk in exchange for giving them that freedom. There is no completely predator-proof way to let chickens wander wherever they want.
Chickens Require Daily Care
Chickens aren't especially complicated animals to care for once you have a good routine, but they do need care every day. They need fresh water and an appropriate complete feed. They need to be checked for illness, injury, or anything else that looks off. Eggs need to be collected. Housing needs to be maintained. Depending on your setup, birds may need to be let out in the morning and secured again at night.
And chickens don't give a shit that it's raining sideways, eight degrees outside, or Christmas morning. They still need to be cared for.
Vacations require planning too. Somebody needs to check the flock while you're gone, even if you have automatic doors, large feeders, and waterers. Equipment fails. Water gets spilled. Predators show up. Chickens occasionally decide today is an excellent day to injure themselves for reasons known only to chickens.
Automation can make chicken keeping easier. It does not replace a chicken keeper.
Your Yard May Never Be the Same
If you have visions of your chickens gracefully wandering through your perfectly landscaped backyard while you sip coffee on the porch, I hate to be the one to ruin this for you. Chickens dig. They scratch through mulch, excavate around plants, make dust baths exactly where you didn't want one, and eat things you planted for yourself while completely ignoring the expensive chicken-friendly plants you lovingly planted specifically for them.
And they poop. Everywhere.
Free-ranging chickens are wonderful, but freedom comes with consequences. Protect anything you aren't willing to sacrifice to the tiny dinosaurs.
Your Chickens Have Not Read the Egg Production Schedule
One of the biggest surprises for new chicken keepers is that hens aren't vending machines with feathers. You don't insert feed and receive one egg per chicken every morning.
When a pullet lays her first egg varies by breed, genetics, nutrition, season, and the individual bird. Some breeds mature relatively early. Others take their sweet damn time. Once they're laying, production still varies by breed and individual, and it generally changes as hens age.
Egg production can also drop because of molt, shorter daylight hours, stress, illness, broodiness, poor nutrition, and other factors. Some hens are fantastic winter layers. Others look at the first short day of fall and apparently put in their vacation request.
If your primary reason for getting six chickens is that you've calculated exactly how many eggs six hens should produce every week for the next eight years, chickens would like a word with your spreadsheet.
Winter Can Mean Fewer Eggs, and That's Okay
Shortening daylight naturally reduces egg production in many hens, and fall and winter are also when many chickens molt. Growing an entirely new set of feathers requires resources, so egg production commonly slows dramatically or stops while that's happening.
Supplemental lighting can be used to maintain egg production through shorter winter days, and some chicken keepers choose to do that. I don't. I prefer to let my birds have the natural break. Managing hens for continuous year-round production can give you more eggs over a shorter productive period, while allowing natural periods of rest can extend their productive laying life.
I'm not running an egg factory, so if my girls want to take some time off during the winter, they can take the damn winter off. I'm still feeding them either way.
Molting Looks Horrible Before It Looks Better
At some point you're going to walk outside, see enough feathers scattered around the coop to construct another chicken, and wonder who died.
Congratulations. It's probably molt.
Chickens periodically replace old feathers with new ones, and some birds handle this transformation with considerably more dignity than others. One hen may lose feathers gradually and barely look different. Another may look like she was fired out of a cannon.
During a molt, egg production often slows or stops, and combs and wattles may become smaller and paler as reproductive activity decreases. Birds can also be less interested in being handled because growing pin feathers can be uncomfortable.
What I don't want you to do is assume every sick-looking chicken is “just molting.” Significant weight loss, severe lethargy, difficulty breathing, abnormal droppings, or other signs of illness deserve attention rather than being written off because there happen to be feathers on the ground.
Chickens Get Sick, and Finding a Vet Can Be Hard
This is something I wish more people thought about before getting chickens. Chickens can get injured. They can develop reproductive problems, respiratory disease, parasites, infections, crop problems, foot injuries, and a whole list of other things you'd rather not learn about at 9:00 on a Sunday night.
And finding a veterinarian who treats chickens can be surprisingly difficult. If you have access to an avian, poultry, or livestock veterinarian who sees chickens, find out who they are before you have an emergency. Don't wait until you're holding a sick hen and frantically calling every veterinary office within 50 miles.
The internet can be useful for learning, but social media chicken groups are not a substitute for diagnosis. You'll post one picture of a sleepy chicken and get twelve diagnoses, four essential oils, somebody telling you to put garlic in her water, and one person confidently announcing that she has a disease that doesn't even occur on your continent.
Know where you're getting your information.
And understand that keeping animals sometimes means making difficult decisions. There may come a time when treatment isn't possible or a bird is suffering and humane euthanasia is the kindest option. That's not the fun part of chicken keeping, but it's part of being responsible for living animals.
Chickens Have Opinions About Other Chickens
A flock isn't always one big happy family. Chickens have a social hierarchy, usually called the pecking order, and they take it surprisingly seriously. Adding new birds to an established flock isn't usually as simple as opening the door and saying, “Everybody be nice.”
Introductions need to be managed, and some squabbling is normal while birds figure out where everyone fits. Excessive aggression, injury, or a bird being prevented from eating or drinking is not something to ignore. You may occasionally need extra space or temporary housing for an injured, sick, broody, bullied, or newly introduced bird.
Basically, owning chickens eventually leads to owning more chicken-related infrastructure than you originally intended.
I don't make the rules.
Chickens Can Live a Long Time After Their Best Laying Years
This one matters if you're thinking about chickens primarily as egg producers. Hens generally lay most heavily when they're younger, and production declines as they age. That doesn't mean the chicken expires when the eggs slow down. She may have years left.
Before you start a flock, think about what that means for you. Are your chickens livestock that you'll cull when production declines? Are they pets that will stay with you through retirement? Is your approach somewhere in between? There isn't one answer every chicken keeper has to choose, but you should know your own answer because eventually you're going to have older birds taking up coop space, eating feed, and producing fewer eggs.
Around here, retirement benefits include room and board.
Apparently I run a very shitty pension plan.
So, Are Chickens Worth It?
For me? Absolutely.
They're messy. They're expensive. They destroy things. They poop on things I didn't even know it was physically possible to poop on. They occasionally scare the hell out of you by looking dead in a dust bath. They develop urgent medical problems five minutes after every veterinarian closes for the weekend.
And I wouldn't want to be without them.
But that's because I wanted chickens, not cheap eggs. I love watching them scratch around the yard. I love seeing the differences between breeds and the personalities of individual birds. I love the ridiculous little conversations they have with me when I walk outside. And yes, there's something pretty damn satisfying about bringing eggs into the house from chickens you know and care for.
If you've read all of this and you're still thinking, “Yep. I want chickens,” good. You're probably asking the right question now. Not whether chickens are easy, whether they'll pay for themselves, or how quickly you can get your first egg.
Do you actually want the life that comes with them?
If the answer is yes, welcome to the chaos.
🐔
Chickens scratch and poop
Fresh eggs never come for free
Still worth it to me
