Keeping Chickens

I agree with the positive comments about this book by other reviewers, but I wanted to add that the photography and typographical layout of this book are wonderful! It is a great book to have on a coffee table--beautiful and wholesome.

This book is loaded with great color photos and tons of good info about how to set-up and maintain a small flock of happy, healthy chickens. Perfect for someone just getting started or, like me, a city gal who just likes to dream about being a farm girl...

I have been keeping laying hens for fifteen years, and this is the best book that I have ever read on the subject of keeping chickens. It is written with the small flock owner in mind. A caring, humane attitude toward these wonderful creatures comes through both the written content and illustrations in the book. The book covers the usual topics, such as the various breeds, housing and cleaning, feeding, breeding, and health care. It also has chapters on the prospective chicken owner's rationale for having chickens, crafts with eggs and feathers, and yummy egg (not chicken meat!) recipes. The color photos and illustrations are spectacular, and the writing is clear and full of useful information. Whether you are new to chicken keeping or are an experienced flock tender, I highly recommend this book.

Anyone keeping chickens, especially those new to the art, will welcome KEEPING CHICKENS: THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO ENJOYING AND GETTING THE BEST FROM CHICKENS. It offers an all-in-one guide to chickens, from understanding the specific attributes of over 40 breed types to choosing, buying, and keeping chickens healthy. If only one chicken-keeping guide were chosen for either a rural or urban library, it should be this: the easy tips and color throughout make it both practical and inviting.

This short but sweet book is loaded with great advice for the potential first-time chicken-owner, on a wide variety of topics, and has a lot of great pictures to go along with it. Unlike some other books about keeping animals that have historically been used only for food purposes, this book acknowledges and has information for every different type of chicken owner. Some people will be keeping them for meat, some for eggs, some for showing, and some as family pets. And indeed, the majority of the book focuses on the care and upkeep of chickens instead of how to kill a chicken and prepare the carcass. As someone who plans to keep chickens for non-meat reasons, I really appreciated that the reader was not talked to with the assumption that one is only keeping chickens for one reason. Topics covered include the many interesting and beautiful breeds of chicken, chicken anatomy, how to hatch eggs with or without a broody hen, whether one should get a rooster, what to feed them, various types of diseases and conditions they're prone to, what type of housing they need, the ins and outs of eggs, and breeding. There are also a lot of neat trivia tidbits, such as the classification of egg sizes, how the earlobe color usually determines the color of the eggs, and the role chickens and roosters have played in various religions. Concluding the book are chapters about interesting arts and crafts one can make with eggshells and feathers (such as earrings, greeting cards, Chinese lacquer, and cress heads) and some interesting recipes one can make with one's eggs (such as hazelnut meringue roulade and baked eggs in mushroom flans). Overall, it really paints a picture of chickens as a fun, interesting, neat, rewarding, worthwhile pet with so many different functions, whether one intends to keep them to show at 4-H shows, to have a year-round supply of eggs, as pets, or as meat.