21 Chicken Resources to Become a Pro Keeper

Chickens are, without question, the most well-known birds on Earth. Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows what a chicken is and what it looks like. No surprise then that chickens also happen to be the most popular poultry species out there, a title they’ve held for a long time.

Despite this, there are plenty of homesteaders who are brand new to keeping chickens or who’ve recently become smitten with the idea.

If you are one of them, it’s easy to feel intimidated: all animals, chickens included, require their own special care, and delivering it requires knowledge and experience.

Luckily, there is an ocean of good info out there that can benefit beginning keepers. In this article, I’ll be sharing with you 21 fantastic chicken resources that will take you from rank novice to seasoned pro in no time.

Books

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The best place to begin any new venture is often in a book. A good instructional manual or encyclopedia can be a repository of hard-earned information, often the equivalent of decades or even centuries’ worth of trial, error, and toil.

The following books are currently in print and represent some of the best instructional texts for brand-new keepers.

Best of all, you’ll never outgrow them: each is a wonderful reference tome that you’ll reach for time and time again when you need answers that the internet just can’t provide.

How to Speak Chicken: Why Your Chickens Do What They Do & Say What They Say

Learning how to care for an animal is one thing, but learning what makes them tick is another. This fantastic book from Melissa Caughey falls squarely into the latter category.

Combining many years of experience, up-close handling, and key observations with cutting-edge scientific findings, this book will teach you the what, why, and when of chicken behavior.

Understanding their psychology is more important than you think for figuring out problems and reducing issues within the flock. You’ll learn how they communicate, establish dominance, show distress and contentment, and a whole lot more. Available in paper or eBook formats.

The Chicken Encyclopedia: An Illustrated Reference

If you are raising chickens for any productive purpose—meaning for eggs, meat, manure, or something else—there are elements concerning selection, housing, healthcare, and management that go far beyond just keeping them as pets or as exhibition birds. If you fancy yourself a serious poultry farmer, this best-selling book will be your go-to.

It covers nearly every aspect of owning, caring for, and raising productive birds, from hatching to breeding, slaughtering to healthcare. Indispensable and highly recommended. Available in your choice of paperback, hardcover, or Kindle formats.

The Chicken Health Handbook, 2nd Edition: A Complete Guide to Maximizing Flock Health and Dealing with Disease

Speaking of healthcare, a big part of your job as a chicken keeper is going to be looking out for the physical well-being of your flock. To do this, you’ll need to learn to recognize everything from common illnesses and parasite infestations to nutritional deficiencies, congenital defects, injuries, and a lot more.

This book is packed with descriptions, illustrations, tips, tricks, and a whole lot more. Diagnosing your feathered friends as quickly as possible can often make a difference in their treatment outcomes, so this book is truly worth its weight in gold. Available in paperback or Kindle.

Know Your Chickens

Just like dogs, horses, and any other domestic animals, picking the right breed of chicken will make a huge difference in your experience. Some chickens are better suited for egg production, like the Australorp. Some breeds, like the Faverolles, are known to be quiet, curious, and friendly with people.

There’s a lot to learn, as you might imagine, so if you want to sort your Wyandottes from your Silkies, this book is a must-own. Available right here.

Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens, 4th Edition: Breed Selection, Facilities, Feeding, Health Care, Managing Layers & Meat Birds

Another comprehensive guide for chicken keepers and one that covers every single facet of ownership and upkeep, with a particular focus on management of laying hens and birds that are raised for meat.

The intricacies of calculating hatch rates, flock sizes, and the seasonal impact of diseases and loss are also examined in detail. Get it here.

Calculators

Believe me when I say that the “just go for it” method of purchasing and housing chickens is total BS. Before you know it, you’ll be struggling with overcrowding, inadequate shelter, or a whole bunch of stressed-out birds that will turn on each other and tear themselves limb from limb. It’s serious business!

Accordingly, taking the time to run some numbers can turn a possible nightmare into a homesteader’s dream. And you won’t need any arithmetic skills, either, if you use these straightforward online calculators.

Raising Costs Calculator

This handy-dandy calculator gives you an overview of what you can expect to spend raising a given number of chickens based on known feed, housing, and healthcare costs or estimates.

You can quickly plug in numbers to get a high-side and low-side estimate of what your yearly expenses will be so you can better plan your journey with your birds.

You can find this calculator here.

Coop Size Estimator

Chickens have to have enough space to themselves, both inside the coop and outside when in the run. Likewise, you’ll need a certain number of nesting boxes for your girls if you want them to reliably lay eggs.

This calculator makes the sometimes tricky formulas a snap and even lets you calculate for standard-sized chickens, smaller bantams, or a mixture thereof.

You can find this calculator here.

Chicken Rate Calculator

A rate calculator is a tool for poultry farmers that will help you figure out the price per unit of weight of your birds. This, naturally, is an important part of the business if you want to maximize profit and minimize expenses. Wishing and hoping is not a strategy if you want to make money from selling chickens or their products! Again, run the numbers and be sure.

Coop Security Level Calculator

Sad to say, but nearly every single chicken keeper I know has lost birds at some point to a predator. Basically, every carnivorous animal on Earth loves—and I do mean loves—the taste of chicken. Security failures from design, materials, or procedures can see your entire flock slaughtered in the night, or your birds brazenly picked off during the day.

Depending on how many birds you have, your coop material, and the predator population in your area, this calculator can give you a rough security assessment concerning your flock’s overall vulnerability.

Coops

If you want to own chickens, they’ve got to have a coop. That’s non-negotiable. Chickens will instinctively want to retreat into their coop when the sun goes down so they can get some sleep. They may also want to stay inside during bouts of bad weather, depending on just how bad it is.

If you’ve got the money and want to save the time, you can buy a pre-built coop or coop kit for assembly, but lots of homesteaders with a penchant for DIY like to make it themselves.

Below is a selection of DIY coop plans that are totally suitable for smaller flocks and easily built by beginners.

DIY Coop with Detailed Walkthrough

Even if you don’t know a thing about working with lumber or doing framing, it’s entirely possible to build a good coop with detailed instructions and expert guidance.

This guide from the Home Depot delivers on both fronts. You’ll just need to pick up your tools and your materials, then follow along with their step-by-step guide.

Small Backyard Coop

I hear lots of lamentations from would-be chicken owners who hold off on getting a flock of their own because they just don’t have enough room. I’m here to tell you that’s not a disqualifier!

You might only have enough room for a few birds, but with a space-efficient coop design like this one, you can keep them on nearly any size property.

Simple Elevated Chicken Coop

Elevating a chicken coop helps to keep your birds inside warmer, cuts down on moisture from groundwater, and reduces wear and tear.

This straightforward design is jacked up on 4×4 posts and easy to build in a single afternoon. Some basic tools, paint, and a little bit of elbow grease are all you will need.

Moveable A-Frame Coop

A-frame coops are one of my favorite designs. They might not be as cute, charming, or quaint as more traditional styles, but they are very easy to build, use less material, and, in the case of this one, are easy to move around so you can reposition your birds on a fresh patch of ground from time to time.

Easy Egg Collection Coop

Whether you want to actually eat them or not, one of the chores that you’ll have to continually take care of with your flock is egg collection. Clambering into the coop to fish them out of the egg boxes is annoying, disruptive to the birds, and generally a huge pain in the butt.

A much, much better option is to swing open a hatch and grab the eggs from outside the coop. A design like this is just the ticket to facilitate that.

Lots More Coop Designs Here!

Didn’t see anything you like above? There’s a whole lot more where that came from at this link.

Free Online Resources

There’s always more to learn when it comes to keeping chickens. The following is a collection of some of the best online resources for keepers, and I myself still use them on a weekly basis. Make sure you bookmark all of them!

Chicken Breed Chart

A thorough and easy-to-reference overview of most domestic chicken breeds. If you need to know about how big they get, what they are best for, egg-laying capability, temperament, and other at-a-glance info, this chart will be your new best friend.

Note that it isn’t completely comprehensive, but so much of the time, generalizations are more helpful than a wall of specifics.

Backyard Chickens for Beginners

Everybody started somewhere, and if you don’t even know which end of the bird the egg comes out of, it will be helpful to start here with this onboarding presentation for backyard chicken keepers.

Covers everything you need to know, from regulatory considerations to setting up shelter, caring for chicks, and a whole lot more.

It’s a great way to get familiarized with the most commonly used concepts and terms. Consider it chicken raising 101!

Chicken Breed Selection Chart

University extensions are often gold mines of information for farmers and homesteaders. Ohio State University is no exception, and this white paper on breed selection from their College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences is invaluable.

This paper has great advice concerning breed selection, particularly as it comes to biosecurity and characteristics.

Like the previously mentioned documents, it also has a supremely helpful chart on the most common domestic chicken breeds, including plumage varieties, egg color, egg size, and other info. If you’ve got your heart set on the perfect chicken for you, this is a great place to start.

Minimizing Chicken Nuisance

This fact sheet comes from the UK government’s regulatory services branch and concerns the keeping of chickens and nuisance issues that might arise from the keeping thereof.

Obviously, the legal issues are of no use whatsoever to American readers; however, it has a significant section covering the prevention and reduction of nuisance issues like odor, the attraction of pests, noise, and so forth.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: keeping a flock of chickens can annoy the daylights out of your neighbors and even cost you relationships, so learning how to mitigate these issues is crucial for keeping the peace.

Toxic Plants Directory

Chickens have a reputation for eating nearly anything, and believe me, they will. But even though they seem to have an iron constitution and an asbestos-clad digestive tract, there are still plenty of things out there in the world that can poison them or even kill them. Mainly, it’s certain kinds of plants.

Regrettably, many of these plants are ornamentals or highly prolific in the wild, so you’ve got to learn which ones to eliminate from your property or to keep your chickens well away from. This thorough database from Poultry DVM is indispensable for that purpose.

Poultry Meds Directory

Another terrific resource from Poultry DVM, this database covers poultry drugs by type—everything from antibiotics and antifungals to hormone treatments and dewormers.

Chickens need medical care, sometimes more than you might think, so learning the basics will help you make informed decisions when dealing with a vet or caring for them yourself.