Tag: chicken intelligence

Daily Adventures with Kate-Kate

~ Crystal Sands ~ Leave a comment

I am taking a break from work to tell this story about Kate, affectionately known as Kate-Kate. Kate is our little Easter Egger mix, part Schubert and part Rooster, and full of personality. She is the one, when she was little, who kept going over to the other mama hen’s crate, which stressed her mama out and stressed me out. Even after I put up a barrier, that sassy little girl would take her tiny little chicken nugget self all the way around the barrier. She was like four days old doing this! I had never and have never since seen anything like it.

Kate is so curious and very independent. .

I was worried about her a bit this winter. It was a long winter with a lot of snow. She was in the coop for weeks and weeks, and I could tell it didn’t sit well with her. She had a look in her eyes that really worried me, but thankfully, despite second winter rearing its head this week, it’s spring. Kate is out of the coop and running around, even though I am trying to get her to stop. I have thought about clipping her wings to keep her out of the driveway and in the chicken area, but since we have had not a single report of bird flu in our area yet and Kate is really good at dodging the mail trucks, I’m just letting her run around the driveway for now.

But she’s difficult because she’s Kate.

So this is what happens: I won’t let her out of the front door of the coop in the morning when I am doing food and water, so she goes around the coop to the side gate and flies over herself. But then, for whatever reason, maybe she has to lay an egg or may she just changed her mind, she stands at the front door of the coop wanting to be let back in. I do not know why she doesn’t just fly back over, but she doesn’t. So, all day long, I am taking breaks from my work and looking out the window to see what Kate is up to. Most of the time, she’s there wanting back in the coop. I ask her why she can’t make up her mind, but my sense from her is that this is exactly what her mind wants.

This process has happened five times of this just today. In fact, I had to go let her in the coop in the middle of writing this post. She walks in without even a “thank you,” just like, “of course you’re going to wait on me.”

On time today, Faure took the opportunity to sneak out when I had the door open for Kate. She was so sassy out there. She meandered over to where the other chickens could see her, and she scratched in the grass like she was so special. The other hens watched in envy. Dvorak watched with worry. He hates when his girls are on the other side of the fence and can’t be protected, and Faure is definitely his girl. They were raised together and are very close.

The cutest thing happened later though. I looked out the window to see Faure freaking out and pacing at the coop door. She is a big girl and cannot fly, so her only chance to get back in the coop is if I let her in. I ran out there because she absolutely looked like she was about to lay an egg. It’s like a pacing when you really have to go the bathroom.

She ran in that coop and went straight for a nest box! It was all fantastic!

It made me think about how much I love getting to spend my days back and forth with these amazing animals. I have been looking for jobs recently, and I realized today that, for some of the jobs, I wouldn’t be able to work from home. I would miss all this. I would miss Kate and Faure and Ruby and all of her antics. It made me decide I had better keep looking for online work. I mean, I’ll do what I have to do, but I sure would like to keep watching my chickens. I am spoiled, I know, but who else is going to tell these chicken stories?

With that in mind, if you are a long-time reader and would consider supporting this blog and the journal on Patreon, I would be grateful. I am planning to hold events for members, so I hope you will consider it if you can. If you have supported in the past but took a break, I hope you will check out the Patreon page again because we now have a $3 a month membership. If you cannot afford it right now, that’s totally understandable. Just leaving a comment of support is really good too.

Sending love to you all!

We are ALL made of stars.

~ Crystal Sands ~ 2 Comments

Last week, Ron brought this beautiful egg to me and said it reminded him of a picture of the universe he had just seen online. He said it made the egg even more beautiful to him.

“We are all made of stars,” I said.

And then he showed me the picture of the universe he saw, and it was remarkably like the spots on the beautiful egg our little Faure lays. I couldn’t share that exact photograph because it is copyrighted, but I found this older picture of the universe. The one you see here was taken by the Hubble telescope in 2009. The patterns on Faure’s egg are so similar to the photo of the universe, and this connection Ron pointed out to me made me think about just how much humans have in common with animals around us, and this was something I didn’t fully understand until I became a farmer. Living so closely with animals helps me understand that humans aren’t that special and yet we are so, so special.

We are all made of star stuff–carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and such–ALL of us. I think most humans think we are special but forget that elephants, dogs, chickens, and ducks who like Bach are made of the same stuff. So many people think we are so different from the animals around us. For a long time, western science said so too. Science is catching up to the truth, I think, but of course, some people have known all along. In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, she writes about the Potawatomi language having words for plants and animals that would translate as things like “tree people” and “horse people.”

In the ten years I have been watching my chickens live their lives in their little community on our farm, I have seen how they make friends, mourn for each other, have people they don’t like, snuggle each other, argue with each other, fight with each other. They are social creatures. They worry. They anticipate. Some of them make cross species connections to me. I see how most of them go along with the crowd. There are some unusual ones who struggle to fit in with the crowd. There can be a price to be paid for not fitting in too. Doesn’t this sound familiar? In so many ways, we are all the same–different scale, different levels of it, but the same stuff.

In the past, when I have tried to tell people this, I have been dismissed, even laughed at, reminded that we can’t “humanize animals,” which is frustrating, especially given the research on chicken intelligence. I have seen some people even seem offended that I would compare humans to chickens.

But it’s magical to me that we all have so much in common, that we are all so similar. There are pattens in Nature that repeat everywhere. Nature is efficient like that. If it works, it works. And we all have those patterns in our cells–in the fabric of who we are. It binds us, does it not?

That’s the magic in this world, and I think we miss this too much. But it’s there, right in front of us–just waiting for us to pay attention to it.

A Ruby Update

~ Crystal Sands ~ Leave a comment

I have been meaning to share a Ruby update for some time because she seemed to have a hard time with Petty getting all of the attention and having the baby chicks. For the first few days, she was really down about it, really subdued–and Ruby is never subdued.

She rarely came to greet me when I went outside. I actually had to go find her to give her a treat. She’s usually at the door demanding her treat pretty much every time I go outside, which is like 30 times a day. When she wasn’t coming around, I was a little worried about her.

I am happy to report that she has been getting better. She doesn’t seem so mopey, and today, when I went outside with some treats, she was right there, front and center.

She can be a really difficult, bossy, complaining chicken, but there’s something about her. I love her so much. So much.

Why People Think Chickens are Stupid–and Why They’re Wrong

~ Crystal Sands ~ 6 Comments

A common charge made against the hen is that she is a silly creature. It is a false charge. A hen is an alarmist, but she is not silly. She has a strong sense of disaster, but many of her fears seem to be well founded. 

~E.B. White “The Hen (An Appreciation)” 1944

When we got our first chickens nearly ten years ago, it didn’t take long for me to see they were far more intelligent than I had been led to believe by our society. It makes sense for people to tell themselves an animal they eat is not smart because, as I can attest, this makes life much easier. Still, after my own experiences, I wondered how people who actually kept chickens might also think chickens are dumb. Over time, I have developed a hypothesis.

At first, I had some chicken-keeping friends tell me that my chickens were “unusual.” At the time, I thought to myself, “Oh, yes! My chickens are special.” I have been at this long enough now that I have seen chickens from national hatcheries and from local farms; I’ve seen meat chickens, as as a wide variety of breeds, from heritage breeds to barnyard mixes. My chickens aren’t special.

There is a range in chicken intelligences, just as there is a range in human intelligences. There is also a range in the types of intelligences chickens possess, just as there are with humans. Just like humans, some chickens are more curious than others; some are simpler; some are easier to handle; some like to complain; some get along well with others; some simply cannot fit in. I think the main reason I tell chicken stories is that I want people to see this range in their personalities and intelligences and make connections. I have learned a lot about human behavior from being a farmer and studying animals. Understanding animal behavior helps me give my own species a little more grace. It helps me give myself a little more grace. But I digress…

This spring, I had an epiphany about why some people accuse chickens of being stupid. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. My husband, Ron, had built a fence around some baby peach trees and some clover he had planted in order to keep the chickens from scratching things up and digging holes. When things were grown up enough, Ron opened up the fence but didn’t get a chance to take the fencing down when a big storm came by one afternoon.

A few of the hens were caught in the fenced area as the rain was pouring down. To get out, they would have to go the opposite direction of the coop and then go around. It was a long way around. Our rooster sat in front of the coop calling and calling for the hens to come in. They could see our rooster and see the coop door but couldn’t see that they needed to go around the long way. Ron and I went out to try to help.

As we tried to herd the hens toward the gate behind them, they just kept panicking more and more. One was determined to get her little self through the fence in a straight line to the door. It took me a few minutes to capture her and carry her to the coop.

“Stupid chicken,” Ron said.

“Oh, she’s not stupid. She was panicking. Think about how many stupid decisions we make when we are stressed and panicked,” I said.

I reminded him of all we know about how our brains work and how stress has such a negative impact on our ability to think clearly and reasonably. Chickens, as well as any other animal, would be the same for sure.

Ron listened to this and agreed. As I thought about it later, I thought of every story I had ever heard from a chicken keeper who seemed to want to prove to me that their chickens were, indeed, stupid. Every single story involved stress for the chickens. In most cases, the person themselves was causing the stress. In fact, in some of the cases, the chicken keepers would soon be eating those chickens, so I feel like the chickens were certainly justified in being stressed and getting worked up. As E.B. White so aptly pointed out, a chicken’s fears are certainly well founded.

Chickens are, after all, prey. While they are also predators and will mess up a poor frog, there are many things that will eat a chicken. It makes sense that they are wound pretty tight and can easily panic, leading to some poor decision making skills.

But here’s what the research tells us, and there is a growing body of really powerful research. According to a 2017 meta-analysis published in the peer-reviewed journal Animal Cognition, chickens can make inferences, do basic math, and are highly emotionally intelligent. Some of the key takeaways from the analysis include the following:

1. Chickens have distinct personalities and are cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally complex individuals.

2. Chickens experience fairly complex positive and negative emotions and have shown evidence of empathy.

3. Chickens exhibit social learning in complex ways that are similar to humans. Chickens also exhibit Machiavellian-like social interactions. (Oh, this last part is so true and fascinating to me.)

4. Chickens perceive time intervals and may be able to anticipate future events.

5. Chickens have the ability to demonstrate self control and may have some self awareness.

6. Chickens have the capacity to reason and make inferences. Researchers assert chickens demonstrate something called transitive inference, which humans are capable of at about age seven.

7. Chickens have complex systems of communication, something that is shared among other highly-intelligent animals, including primates.

These are just some of the compelling findings, and as more research continues in situations where chickens are studied in comfortable environments as opposed to in labs, more information is coming forward about just how fantastically intelligent these animals are.

What this means for us as humans who eat chicken, I do not know, but I hope it means that we will start the work to ensure that chickens are treated well and with respect while they are alive, whether they are providing us with food through laying eggs or providing us with meat.

At the very least, the next time you hear someone say that chickens are stupid, you can point them to some compelling research to the contrary.

Further Reading

Under the Henfluence by Tove Danovich, 2023

How to Speak Chicken by Melissa Caughey, 2017

Birdology by Sy Montgomery, 2011

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Barn? To Sign Up for the Scientific Study by Emily Anthes, 2022

Just this picture of Petty and a story…

~ Crystal Sands ~ 1 Comment
Look at this proud mama. Petty is doing such a great job. Ruby is clearly sad she doesn’t have the babies this time, but it’s nice for Petty to have this opportunity. Not all hens have in them to be a mama. When they do, it’s cool to give them a chance.

Today, we drove about an hour north to buy some local honey direct from a beautiful farm. I met a farmer who said to me, “You know, chickens are really highly intelligent. People think I’m crazy, but it’s only because they don’t have chickens.”

I smiled and nodded so big.

“Or pay attention,” I added.

She agreed wholeheartedly.

Under the Henfluence: A Book Review

~ Crystal Sands ~ 4 Comments

Day 333 of 365

I am jealous of two things in my life–barns and I am jealous of this magnificent book. I wish I was not, but this is the book of my dreams. In her new book, Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them, Tove Danovich weaves her experiences with chickens with the latest research as well as the history these beautiful birds to create a book that compels readers to think about chickens with a more open mind. She asks readers to consider a world where chickens are treated with the respect they deserve.

In her introductory chapter, Danovich writes, “This book is about chickens, yes, but it is also about how they can change your life if you let them” (p. 7).

And Danovich shows the readers how she is changed by her chickens, along with what she learns about their intelligence and their individual personalities. Danovich’s stories and experiences will resonate with so many of us. She describes that first day meeting her baby chicks, of picking them up at the post office early in the morning and meeting the fluffy babies. This early chapter really spoke to me. I remember that morning of picking up my baby chicks at the post office and being in awe. I used to keep a blog called Pajamas, Books, and Chickens. In my first post, I wrote about meeting my chickens for the first time:

I stood at the back door of the post office and knocked. When a woman came to the door, I told her I was there for a box of baby chicks. She asked my name and then disappeared behind the post office door. She reappeared a few minutes later with a box much smaller than I had anticipated, and that box was cheeping loudly. I loved those chicks before I could even see them. I loved how they sounded. As I carried the girls to the car, I spoke through the holes in the box. “Hi, babies, I am your mama, and everything is going to be alright.”

There are some major milestones in my life, and, as wild as it sounds, getting our chicks was a milestone for me. In the days after we brought the girls home, I gave notice at my job in academic administration and set out to change my life.

Danovich tells a similar story–one so many of us will identify with, only her writing is vivid and gorgeous.

She writes: When I got to the front and told the woman what I was there for, her face lit up with a smile. “They’re just over on my desk. I’ll go get them for you.”

She walked into the back. I heard her coming toward me a few seconds before I saw her. “Peep! Peep! Peep! Peep!” the chicks yelled furiously from their cardboard box…For three small birds, they sure could make a lot of noise (p. 16).

Danovich has a beautiful writing style, and I love the way she describes both the highs and lows of keeping chickens. She describes the curiosity and learning that happens when you keep chickens for the first time–the kind that changes your heart and mind and brings you such joy. She also describes the heartbreak that happens when you fall in love with these magnificent creatures because, inevitably, there will be loss.

In the book, she describes her first loss where she felt responsible. Her dog killed one of her hens, Betty, and Danovich struggled to forgive herself. I know this pain well. We lost a dear hen to a hawk attack, but I was home and heard the scream. I didn’t run out to her immediately because I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. We lost Lucy II because I didn’t run to her immediately, and the guilt was powerful. I also really struggled because friends and family couldn’t understand my grief. So many times, I heard people say, “It’s just a chicken.”

Danovich writes of her own first heartbreak and of the grief the other hens felt about the loss of their friend and member of their little flock of three: When I stopped crying long enough to come outside to check on Lyle’s progress [he was digging a grave for Betty], I heard Peggy and Joan calling from the coop…Unless I was right next to the birds, I rarely heard them make a noise at all. Now their calls rang out from the coop to the front door, two hundred feet away. I took a moment to listen, as I had done so often when they were chicks. That’s when the tears came again.

“It’s the lost chick call,” I said as I got closer to Lyle. “The sound. It’s the same one they made as chicks when they were separated from the flock.” (p. 47).

Under the Henfluence resonated with me over and over again. Danovich even named her first chickens after characters in Mad Men. I also have hens named after Mad Men–Joan, a Rhode Island Red; Betty, the most perfectly beautiful hen I have ever seen; and Peggy, who is no longer with us. If you follow this blog and love my chicken stories, I promise you are going to love this new book.

Danovich not only tells the story of her own experiences with chickens, but she also tells the story of chickens in general–of their relationships with humans throughout history and what we know now thanks to new research about chicken intelligence and individuality.

I had the good fortune of speaking with Tove Danovich about her book. It’s a book she has been working on for years and a book that is missing from the “canon” of chicken books. So many chicken books approach chickens as commodity; this book approaches chickens with reverence. Sy Montgomery has touched on this topic in her chapter on chickens in her book, Birdology, but to my knowledge (and I have surely read 100 chicken books), Tove Danovich’s book is the first of its kind. I hope to ride her coattails and publish my own book on chickens, different but with the same message about the value of these animals, which is so much more than most people think.

Tove Danovich is paving the way to a different conversation. As a chicken person, I am thankful to her for writing this and to her publisher for publishing a book that is so needed. It is also a book that I think our culture is ready for. As more and more Americans get backyard chickens, they are learning the truth about these birds, one that been obscured by our food industry for reasons of profit.

Near the end of the book, Danovich tells the story of getting some ex-battery hens and what it is like rescuing hens from such a terrible life. She describes their lack of feathers, their uncertainty, and Danovich tells the truth about the rehabilitation of these animals. It is a truth more people need to know. Where we get our food matters. How animals are treated matters. It’s that simple, and it is my goal to follow in Danovich’s footsteps and rescue battery hens one day.

One of the last things Danovich told me in our interview really touched me. She said, “I don’t think there is any animal, big or small, that we have been surprised by how little they know. It’s always quite the opposite. If you get to know chickens, you will be surprised by how smart they are.”

And that’s the truth.

Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them is a groundbreaking book and a powerful read. It is available right now in hardcover from Agate publishing. Buy a copy for yourself and for every chicken lady you know. It will be treasured.

And, to celebrate this new book, I’m doing a Farmer-ish giveaway. All you have to do is share this post and leave a comment that you shared it, and you will be entered to win a brand new, hardcover copy of this fantastic book.The deadline to enter is April 16 at midnight, and you must live in the U.S. Don’t forget to leave a comment to let me know you shared this post!