Picking winter hardy chickens for your flock

Spring Chick by Gina Pina

All of the feed stores are full of peeping chicks – springtime is officially here. Despite the sign over the bin housing all of these terribly cute puffballs, which reads, “Do NOT handle the chicks!” – you find yourself reaching in to caress and hold whichever chick you can easily pick up. You really want to hold this cheeping ball of down up against your cheek, but don’t dare risk it because you might get caught by a clerk. You can barely contain the growing urge to buy a couple chicks — you are convincing yourself that you need baby chicks and you want to buy some right now.

Before you get swept up in a completely understandable impulse chicken purchase, you may want to step back and carefully choose your downy babies. It is just a blink of an eye and then your then your tiny chicks are full-grown birds. It is important that you select chicks that will grow up into hens and roosters that will suit your needs and your situation.

Three Spring Chicks – by Gina Pina

We will be discussing how to pick winter-hardy birds for cold climates in today’s show. Please join me as I delve into which breeds of chickens are commonly believed to do well in cold weather and which breeds may not fare as well in wintery locales – or at least, not without special accommodations.

Also in this episode, the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg is finally answered in Sally’s Sidenotes. Additionally, I will be sharing a couple recent chicken news articles that debate whether backyard chickens are significant spreaders of salmonella. That and much more on today’s show!

Show Notes

NPR Article (linking backyard chickens to Salmonella risks and outbreak) LINK
Think Progress Article (written as a response to the NPR article above) LINK

Sally’s Sidenotes

Which came first – Chicken or Egg? answered by ASAP Science VIDEO
Bonus: Jay Leno Easter Pranks VIDEO (I don’t know what is scarier in this video: how little people know about chickens [e.g. chicks are NOT like Sea Monkeys!] or that someday in the foreseeable future they will engineer Sea Monkey-esque chicks.)
Bonus: Hilarious Jimmy Fallon singing chicken group, The Chickeneers, spoofing the Lumineers’ song “Ho, Hey” VIDEO

Photos of Beatrix (“Bebe”) and Coco Chicken