How to Keep Chickens

Keeping chickens at home requires a lot of patience for their overall maintenance. Building a proper chicken coop and providing them the necessary things is indeed a difficult task. You will have to know their food habits and maintaining hygiene is one of the most important factors that should be taken care of. Changing the living conditions depending on the seasonal changes is vital for proper upbringing of the chicken breeds. Thus, you have to consider all these factors before rearing chickens at home. Apart from these, you need to take certain precautionary steps for keeping them safe inside their habitat. Protecting your chickens from falling prey to predators is also a concern. In this article you shall get the basic knowledge on how to keep chickens.

How to Keep Chickens from Flying
Chickens, after hatching, gradually learn to fly. While raising chickens at home you have to be very careful that they do not fly away. They often tend to move out of their coop and wander in gardens. This further increases their chance of falling to prey to other animals. Therefore, adopt the following ways to prevent them from flying out of the coop.

• One way to prevent chickens from flying is by clipping their wings. Clip their flight wings tight enough so that they are not able to fly.
• The second technique is by trimming off their flight feathers. Cut the feathers smoothly from the back and the side so that they do not look naked.
• The best technique is by rearing them in a closed area. This implies raising a wire mesh around the area where they are kept and barricading the open space with a net.

How to Keep Chickens Warm in Winter
Keeping chickens warm during the winter season is vital for their health. Although their feather coat offers considerable protection during winter season, they still require additional protection. This can be ensured by taking the following measures.

• If you have reared chickens in small scale (4-5), then you can wrap a low weight bedding over them. This will provide comfort and warmth to them.
• Application of Vaseline or warm oil on the tip of their ears prevents shivering and frostbite.
• Cover the open spaces of the coop with a carpet or a rag so that entry of cold winds is blocked. Make sure that there is sufficient ventilation.
• When chickens are reared on a large scale, the floor of the coop is covered with saw dust. This acts as an insulating material during the winters and thus, their body remains warm.
• You can also put an additional heat source (bulbs) inside their rearing zones that will keep the surroundings warm.

How to Keep Chickens Laying
The surrounding temperature has to be warm during the egg laying season and subsequent hatching. Therefore, summer is the ideal time for laying. Due to the fall in temperature, chickens often face problem of hatching. Thus, you have to provide them extra heat for successful laying of eggs.

• You need to provide the natural conditions like the summer season. This includes provision of heat sources to keep the environment conducive for laying and hatching of eggs.
• Light should be provided for at least 15 hours, similar to the duration of day during summer season.
• You will also have to take care of their health and keep the temperature warm inside. Include protein rich foods and a glass of warm water mixed with a pinch of pepper.

Rearing chicken in a small scale is not as difficult as maintaining a large poultry farm. However, the guidelines given above on how to keep chickens are the basic conditions required for bringing up chickens. Last but not the least, I should say that keep an eye on their health conditions and ensure that they are not suffering from any kind of diseases.