My Pet Chicken Blog

One of our readers is having problems with feather picking. She writes:   Listen Lissa, My chickens turned a year old this past August. During the winter months, I noticed one of my chickens lost a lot of vent feathers, all the feathers around her bottom and part way up her back and then had an open sore […]

Backyard pet chickens don’t normally need to be bathed. There are exceptions; the most common being in preparation for showing your chickens at a poultry exhibition. But there are other occasions where you may need to bathe your chicken, times when an emergency chicken bath may be in order. A reader of Lissa’s chicken advice […]

Look at the hen and chicks! (No, not the feathered kind.) They’re something you don’t need a green thumb to grow! They do well in pots, inside and out, rock gardens, sandy gardens and they’re completely drought tolerant. They don’t do well in soggy soil though, so be careful to keep your hen and chicks […]

A reader of our chicken advice column has a question about her chickens coming home to roost: Listen Lissa, We have a flock of three so far (more in the brooder) who get along great, and have been in the same roomy coop with plenty of roosts since they were chicks. They’re about 17 weeks […]

How do you keep clean water in the coop? Having clean water in the coop at all times is important for keeping healthy chickens, but achieving this can be a challenge.   I don’t know about you, but for me, litter and poop in the water is the main problem I encounter.  It seems that no […]

A Listen Lissa reader writes in with a question about her hens’ funny-looking eggs: I have a question about some funny-looking eggs. My chickens are a year old now, and have been laying for about seven months. Recently, I’ve noticed that two have had extra shell build-up on the outside of their eggs, sort of […]