Chickens, as well as other animals, have the ability to change their behavior (behavioral plasticity) and physiology (physiological plasticity) based on the costs and benefits to fit their environment (adaptation). Through natural selection, the population preserves and accumulates traits that are beneficial and rejects those that are detrimental…

Many years' practical experience in raising and keeping poultry and investigations in poultry breeding at the Maine Experiment Station have resulted in the accumulation of a considerable fund of information on poultry management. It is the purpose of the following pages to outline this experience for the benefit of poultry keepers and thereby to…

One of the essentials for success in poultry-club work is good stock. This means standardbred stock; 1 for this stock has been bred and developed for specific purposes and therefore best meets the needs of the boy or girl. A flock of standardbred fowls possesses a uniformity of appearance which the mongrel flock never has, and will arouse the club…

The interest in Plymouth Rocks is almost worldwide; no other fancy fowl has awakened so much enthusiasm. To perfect and beautify it, more continuous hard labor has been performed and more profound study given than has ever fallen to the lot of any other variety of fancy fowls. Theories have been evolved and almost as often exploded. Yet, one point…

There are many devices and ideas being sold on the market which claim to reveal a method of testing the sex of an egg before incubation, or of a chick as soon as hatched. We have tested practically all of these known methods and have found most of them unreliable.

It is only after testing a method that was discovered by Mrs. Noda Fry, of…

Doing over nature, forcing the hen to lay eggs to an extent heretofore impossible has been the life work of the most justly celebrated of poultry breeders, Tom Barron, of Catforth, England; doing the very thing that nature made no provision for is the result of Tom Barron's work with hens, a work teeming with success to a degree that no American…

One of the most important advance steps in commercial poultry keeping in recent years, and one that promises to exercise a truly great influence upon the development and permanent upbuilding of the industry, is the more exact knowledge poultry keepers now have of the characters of individual fowls; also the extent to which these characters, whether…

"...All hens in a flock look pretty much alike at first glance, and it is hard to pick out individual characteristics. But I had to say something.

'Perhaps you mean they vary somewhat in size. You have some very white birds.'

'I mean they're all sorts and kinds. I've got some very white birds, and I've got some not so white. I've got some big…