My Pet Chicken Blog

Before I got chickens, I pictured them as rather easily spooked, nervous, flighty. But nothing seems further from the truth. When I walk outside, they don’t scatter and run away. Instead, I am the target of a chicken stampede. If you keep chickens, you know what I mean. Wherever they are in the yard, they [...]

I wrote a post a while ago, entitled “three ways chickens will freak you out.” A recent comment by a reader reminded me of another way chickens can freak you out, and it inspired me to share the story of how I almost gave our chicken sitter a heart attack! Poor John. He didn’t take his “chicken sitter” duties [...]

My chickens free range, and there are a lot of benefits that go along with that. I love to garden… and there are a lot of benefits that go along with that, too. Sometimes these two hobbies are tough to combine though. Chickens love to scratch. They love to dig. They love to dust bathe. [...]

We have had mixed success with our egg-eating hen Isa that I talked about in this blog post. I appreciated all the feedback and suggestions you offered on that post—it’s good to know that I’m not the only one dealing with this problem! I tried one of your suggestions, and I also went ahead with [...]

If you haven’t read the previous stories about Hildy, let me introduce her to you. She was our blind hen, and one of our favorites. She lost her sight when she was young, and had only very limited vision throughout the rest of her life. From what we could tell, she seemed to be able to [...]

How can you teach a blind hen to forage if she can’t see what’s on the ground? That was the problem that presented itself to us when Hildy learned to go outside. When our blind hen learned to use the coop door to come outside, we were thrilled—but also frightened and worried for her.

One of our biggest worries relating to Hildy our blind hen was that, while she had learned to leave the coop, she hadn’t learned how to go back in. This made a certain amount of sense, given her disability. After all, when leaving the coop in the morning, she was going toward a bright patch [...]

For the first few years, our blind hen Hildy didn’t ever leave the coop on her own. This was something of a relief. After she recovered from her injury and learned to find the feeder on her own, it gave her unmolested time to eat and drink from the feeders and waterers, since the rest [...]

Last week I wrote about my blind hen, Hildy;  she was completely blind in one eye, and seemed to have very limited vision in her other eye. I’ll tell another story about Hildy this week. (It’s wonderful to be able to share stories about a hen with people who understand how much personality chickens can [...]

I’ve sort of hesitated writing about Hildy, my blind hen. Why? I get emotional about her. Of all the chickens I’ve had, she was one of my absolute favorites. She died a little more than a year ago. But I was looking through some old photographs, and I made it through without crying, so maybe [...]