First, let’s get one of the most popular misconceptions out of the way. While a rooster’s comb is usually larger and brightly colored, hens also have them!

A chicken’s comb sits above the beak and the waddles hang below the chin. Combs come in all shapes and sizes. A single comb (probably the most common) will stand straight up with several rows of spikes. A rose comb is short and ruffled allowing these birds to be hardy in the winter because they are less likely to get frost bite. A pea comb is even smaller with several round bumps, resembling...can you guess? A pea pod! There are several more shapes combs come in, commonly a mixture of the ones described above. 

While combs and waddles give chickens a unique look and help attract mates, there is an actual purpose behind them. Part of the chicken’s heat regulation system, thick vanes run through the comb and waddles. This allows overheated blood to circulate and be air cooled. 

Fun fact: If your chicken’s comb is pale and flopping over, it can be a sign they are sick. It could just be that they are molting (like a dog sheds but, so a chicken can grow new feathers) but, it could be a sign of dehydration, poor circulation, or parasites.  

Thanks for sticking through the whole class and not falling asleep! See you next time 🤓

Grab your notebook cause this lesson is full of fun facts.

A chicken digests their food in three parts. First, food is stored in a sack called the crop. If you see a bump just above the breast there is nothing wrong with your chicken, their crop is just full! As the digestion process continues, you will see your chicken’s crop increase and decrease in size. Swipe to see exactly where the crop is located! 

Food will slowly move out of the crop and into the proventriculus where it soaks in digestive enzymes and softens a little. 

Finally, food moves into the gizzard, the muscular part of the digestive tract. As the muscle moves, food is ground into small pieces by mixing with grit or small rocks. If your soil isn’t naturally a little rocky, it’s important to provide your chickens with grit to help with digestion. You can put grit in a small cup or throw it on the ground, chickens will just take what they need. 

Knowing how your chickens digest their food is helpful in detecting illnesses such as sour crop which I’m sure we will talk about at some point! See you next time chicken nerds 🤓

A chicken has ears on both side of their head just behind the eyes. The opening is covered by a tuft of feathers to protect the ear but doesn’t interfere with sound perception. Besides ear lobes, chickens don’t have external flaps like we do. Waterfowl have similar ear anatomy. Did you know that ducks can close their ears when they go under water?! 

Like humans, chickens have an outer, middle, and inner ear. Besides the structure of the middle ear it works similarly ours! The outer ear collects sound waves, vibrating the ear drum, and moves them to the middle ear. The vibrations are moved to the inner ear and transmitted to auditory nerves where the information can be sent to the part of the brain that recognizes sound. 

In humans, hearing loss associated with age is often due to damage to sensory hair cells in the inner ear. Chickens have the ability to regrow these hair cells and are being studied for human hearing loss treatments! 

While the anatomy of a chicken and human ear is very similar, chickens can hear significantly better. Hearing begins when the embryo is just 12 days old. A mother hen will talk to the eggs and as they develop more you can hear the chicks talking back. A chicken can pinpoint where a sound came from within a few feet. This is done by assessing the lag time between the sound’s arrival at either side of their head! 

All these cool facts and we still don’t know why the chicken crossed the road? See you next time chicken nerds 🤓

Help us with this myth buster! Some people say the color of a chicken’s ear lobe will be the color of the egg they lay. We have noticed the ear lobe becomes a little pale right before laying an egg. But we have never correlated the lobe to egg color, have you?!

Hello chicken nerds ready for another lesson in anatomy?

Today’s topic is the beak. Obviously sitting at the front of the chickens head, it’s used to break food into small pieces, open seeds, and tear off grass. But it’s so much more than food access! 

Chickens will use their beaks to establish social status called a pecking order by literally pecking others into submission. The other day we saw two chickens working out the pecking order and one of them grabbed the others face with its beak to hold it down. After that everything seemed to be worked out and both chickens went on their way. We’ve talked about pecking order in another post if you want more info! 

A few more uses of the beak, roosters will use them to maintain hold of a hen while mating. The beak is also important for preening (cleaning feathers) and defense. Those of you with chickens know that pecks are usually pretty light but every once in awhile they can hurt pretty bad! 

Chicken beaks are made of keratin like our finger nails! All of this beak activity usually keeps them trimmed. However, if your chickens live in an area with out places to scratch and dig you might need to trim their beak. We’ve personally never had to do this but it seems just as simple as trimming your dog’s nails. 

*ding ding* class dismissed!

Hi class, welcome back to Chicken Anatomy! Today’s topic is vision. 

A chicken’s eyes are located on either side of their head allowing them to see 300 degrees around. Most of our chickens have a gold eye color but they can also be brown, black, or red. The eye works similar to a humans with three cones to see red, blue, and green light. Chickens also have a fourth cone that allows them to see ultraviolet light! Able to see more colors and shades, chickens can spot bugs and seeds easily against the non-UV reflecting dirt and grass. Another pro of that fourth cone is growing feathers reflect UV light so a mother hen can literally see which chicks are the healthiest. 

When a chick is still in the egg they turn themselves so the right eye is exposed to light and the left is covered. This results in the chicken having mono-vision. The left eye is far sighted and the right is near. Next time your flock sees a bird flying above pay attention to if they look with their right or left eye! Chickens eye’s are completely independent allowing them to look and process different things at once. They can even sleep with one eye open and on the look out for predators while the other rests! 

Chickens have a pineal glad to help them sense light. The skull is so thin that light can penetrate through and stimulate the glad. Even if your chicken is completely blind, they can still sense daylight and season changes! This gland also regulates a chicken’s reproductive cycle explaining why egg laying is dependent on daylight. Without the necessary hours of light (like shorter winter days), the gland won’t be stimulated and egg production goes down. 

While we just described the eye sight of a chicken to be pretty phenomenal, they do have one flaw. They can’t see at night! Chickens often move into their coop at dusk out of fear of not being able to find the coop once it’s dark. 

Fun Fact: Have you ever taken a picture of your chicken and their eye looks foggy? This is their third eyelid! It moves horizontally to keep dust out and is transparent so they can still see! Great for those dust baths but can easily ruin your perfect chicken picture! 

See ya next time chicken nerds! 🤓

Yup, you guessed it, it’s time for another lesson in chicken anatomy. Today’s topic is about a chicken’s sense of smell! 

A chicken’s nostrils are located on their beak closest to the comb. They begin to develop a sense of smell when they are still in their egg! While it’s not anywhere close to say a dog’s sniffer, it’s still pretty strong. 

Chickens use their sense of smell to detect predators. One research study placed feces of prey and non-prey animals in a chicken coop. The chickens responded to the prey feces with alertness and had no response to the non-prey!  

Our sense of smell and taste are so intertwined that how a food smells can largely determine what we eat. But this isn’t as true for a chicken! They only have up to 300 taste buds (we have 10,000) that are located towards the back of the tongue. Even if a chicken can taste their food, it’s a little too late to spit it out, the food is probably already on the way down. Sight, sound, and feel are probably the sense chickens rely on more when deciding what to eat. Nutritional value also weighs in a bit. 

Some people put herbs like rosemary in their chicken coop to act as a deodorizer, insect repellant, and even to prevent respiratory issues. Not only will you enjoy a fresh coop but your chickens can appreciate the smell too!

Fun Story: A fellow chicken owner said her flock loves raisins! So she keeps them in her pockets as a treat while feeding the chickens their normal pellets. On days they are in her pockets, the chickens swarm her. No raisins in her pockets and they go straight for the pellets. That’s an impressive sense of smell, there is no way I could tell if you have raisins in your pockets or not! 

Until next time chicken nerds 🤓