My Pet Chicken Blog

Bearded chickens. When it comes to choosing chicken breeds, I go for beards. Why do I love them so much? I’m not sure quite why, but bearded hens to me look especially lovely. Seems a beard might make a girl look masculine, but not in the case of chickens—at least not to me. The fancy […]

My 5 year old daughter is really into dinosaurs right now. I mean REALLY into dinosaurs. We read books, collect toys, watch dinosaur cartoons and she forces me to try to pronounce things like carcharodontosaurus or Velociraptor mongoliensis. So anything we find that we can read about these reptiles, we will. While she’s into dinosaurs, […]

Chicken ornaments. It’s time to get mine out. And yes, I decorate with chickens for the holidays… at least partly. (Then again, everything in my life is at least partly chicken!) I always thought that if I got ambitious enough, I might get a photo of my family with three French Hens in front of […]

Dealing with egg eating hens is a very frustrating problem—one I’m trying to deal with right now. I prefer our hens leave their eggs for us to eat, so I have some work ahead of me! Let me start off telling you about our problem chicken, Isa.  She is an ISA Brown chicken (a sex-linked […]

How to prepare your chickens for winter isn’t especially intuitive, and many people may take steps that can actually make things more difficult for their flock rather than helping them to become cold weather chickens!  Choosing cold hardy breeds (if you live in an area of cold winters) is certainly an important first step! But […]

A couple of months ago, I dreamed my flock was destroyed. I bolted upright out of bed, fuming mad at those (!@*$) darn raccoons… and then, in a fog, realized it was just a dream. The coop in my dream was the wrong one–it was from a house we lived in years ago. The chickens […]

To wash eggs or not to wash eggs… that is the question! Except that it’s not much of a question for me. Washing eggs is something that can be on the risky side, if you do it wrong, so I don’t wash my eggs unless they’re soiled. Even then, I don’t wash them unless they’re […]

In an earlier post I mentioned the damage done by hurricane Irene to our enclosed chicken run. Our run hadn’t been predator-proof for almost a year. Things have been very busy at My Pet Chicken and it took a scheduled one-week family vacation this summer to finally pull me from behind the keyboard and put on my […]

I loved Autumn’s post about Chicken Family History early this week. It reminded me of an old family letter I have. It’s a letter from my great great great grandma Virginia Jackson Marshall, written to my grandmother when grandma was eight and great granny was 92. In the letter, there’s no punctuation to speak of, […]