Chicken
The pecking order is literal, and it settles who eats first. A good layer gives hundreds of eggs a year, and the flock has a call for most things.
Photo by SimonWaldherr, CC BY 4.0
Overview
Chickens are the usual first livestock, and the reason is that the maths works: four square feet of coop and eight of run each, layer feed, grit, and a flock of three or more, and you get eggs from something that also eats the kitchen scraps and the garden pests.
The part that catches people out is that a chicken is livestock rather than a pet with feathers. They live five to ten years but lay well for only the first two or three, and a flock has a firm pecking order that decides who eats and who gets bullied. A hen at the bottom of it can be in real trouble without anything obvious happening.
Temperament
Sociable, curious and hard on a garden. Chickens forage by scratching, which means they will take a flower bed apart in an afternoon, and no amount of feed stops them, because the scratching is the point rather than the hunger.
They are noisier than people expect, and it is not only the cockerel. A hen announcing an egg is loud, and she does it most days. Individual birds do become tame and will come when called, particularly if you are the one holding the scraps.
Care and grooming
A complete layer feed with the calcium a laying hen needs, plus grit, since a chicken grinds its food in the gizzard rather than chewing it.
The daily jobs are water, eggs and a look at every bird. Red mite lives in the coop rather than on the bird and comes out at night, so the coop is what you inspect for it. Chickens also carry the parasites behind blackhead disease without getting ill themselves, which matters enormously if you are thinking about turkeys.
Living and exercise
A coop that shuts properly and a run that is covered. Almost everything eats chickens: fox, badger, hawk, rat, and a neighbour's dog, and losses nearly always come down to a gap somebody meant to fix.
They put themselves to bed at dusk, which makes the routine easy, and they need a dust bathing spot as much as they need the feeder. Dust bathing is how a chicken manages parasites, and a bird with nowhere dry to do it will find somewhere you would rather it did not.
Something here wrong or out of date?