FAQ about Our Chickens

Our girls love to "dust-bathe" in the mulch!

Chickens are the best conversation starters. Whether chatting with the neighbors over the fence, talking to people in cars who slow down to catch a glimpse of our girls, or showing off the beautiful eggs, I find plenty of opportunities to talk about the joys of keeping these fluffy fowl.

People are often eager to learn more about both our specific chickens and chickens in general, and the same questions have come up several times. So, as a public service announcement, here are the top ten questions we get about our chickens, with answers from yours truly!

1. Where did you buy them?

We bought our chickies last September from the Fenton Feed Mill, which sources their chicks from the Ideal Poultry Hatchery in Texas. Although a lot of books and articles will tell you to order chicks via mail, most hatcheries won’t sell you a small number of chicks because shipping them in small numbers is much more stressful to the birds. So I was glad I came across the mill! They post updates about shipments of chicks on their Facebook page, so if you’re in the St. Louis area and are interested in getting just a few birds, I highly recommend them.

2. Do you have a rooster (and do you need one)?

After finding five eggs in the nest box in one day, we can officially confirm that we don’t have any roosters! An expert can tell the gender of a baby chick right when it’s born, but there’s always a small chance that you’ll get a male. Fortunately, all five of our girls are laying, so we are officially obeying the St. Charles prohibition against roosters. Hens will lay eggs without a rooster, the eggs just won’t be fertile— which is fine with us.

3. How much work is it to keep chickens?

Getting the whole set-up together took a lot of time and money, and raising the chickens until they were old enough to be put outside was probably about as much work as keeping a hamster or other small animal. Now that our system is put together, it’s not much work. Every morning I bring them a small plastic bin of food, rinse out and refill their water, and check for eggs. I’ll go out around noon to let them forage in our compost pile and to gather eggs again, and usually once more at night, although three times a day isn’t necessary. We clean their henhouse about once a week.

4. Are you going to eat your chickens?

At this point, we are planning to cull our chickens once they get past laying age, but I’ve never killed an animal before so I’m not sure how it will come down— we may end up giving them to someone who will humanely butcher them for the soup pot. Chickens can live upwards of 20 years, and since they are livestock, not pets, we don’t want to continue feeding them if they are not going to lay.

5. What?! How could you eat something that’s so cute?

If you’re a vegan, this is a good question. Our relationship with meat is very complex, and I wrote about it more in these three blog posts (part 1, part 2, part 3). If you are not a vegan, it’s true that the idea of killing these cute creatures is hard for me, but I remind myself that they live happy lives, unlike industrially-raised chickens, who are usually cramped, fed a diet of antibiotics, and routinely starved to force them to molt. Looking an animal in the face before eating it is emotionally and mentally weighty— and again, I’m not exactly sure how I’ll handle it— but I firmly believe that this face-to-face interaction is necessary to be intellectually and morally honest about eating meat.

6. Are chickens vegetarians/insectivores?

Nope, they are avid omnivores! (See this video for proof.) The idea that chickens are vegetarians is a myth reinforced by the proud, “100% Vegetarian Fed” labels on grocery-store eggs. Chickens eat a lot of grains and greens, but they also love bugs, worms, spiders, mice, snakes, and carrion (although ours have mainly just hunted grasshoppers and worms so far). Traditionally, people would feed chickens small animal carcasses during the winter when there weren’t any bugs out, in order to keep their protein levels high. In fact, if you dropped dead in your chicken run, your chickens would happily eat you. They’re basically little scavenging dinosaurs.

7. Are brown eggs healthier than white eggs?

I used to think that brown eggs were a sign of chickens having a healthier diet— and organic grocery-store eggs perpetuate this misconception by only marketing brown eggs. In fact, the color of an egg is dependent on breed, not diet. Some hens lay brown eggs, some white, and some bluish-green, like our girl Bobbie Dylan. 

8. What do your hens’ eggs taste like?

Brown or blue, all chicken eggs taste roughly the same. Eggs laid from happy chickens who get to scratch and eat greens all day taste like regular eggs— except much richer, fuller, and more intense. The yolks are bright to dark orange and stand up tall in the pan, and the white is very white and not very runny. This is due to diet and exercise, not shell color.

9. Are these eggs healthier than eggs at the grocery store?
Yup! See this study about pastured eggs vs. store-bought eggs. Even the organic eggs at the grocery store are usually taken from chickens who live in cramped quarters and don’t go outside very much.

10. Are you glad you got chickens?
Absolutely! They aren’t that much work, their eggs are delicious, their poop makes rich compost, and they are downright hilarious to watch. I’m so glad we finally made the plunge and brought chickens into our lives!

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