Dunno about chickens, but I can tell you from personal experience that guinea fowl can be insanely, idiotically brave in attacking much larger opponents, even when said opponents take the form of moving motor vehicles.
ETF is right. Birds can be astoundingly brave if they think they are defending their chicks.
Otherwise, it depends on the bird and the mood they are in. I’ve seen birds in cages in open-air trucks go down the highway at 55 miles an hour with nary a whimper. For some reason, they don’t react much when it’s dark out, even though they are clearly awake and aware of what’s going on.
I’ve been attacked by bantam roosters so small I could crush them underfoot.
I’ve had chickens scream like I was torturing them when all I did was pick them up.
There are lots of stories of birds trampling one another to death when something spooks a big bunch of them. A recent one was in Germany where a motorist crashed his car into a poultry house. The birds panicked and piled into the corner, crushing each other.
A key thing to keep in mind whenever analyzing domestic poultry behavior: They are stupid. They are bag-of-hammers stupid. They are tiny rafts of brain adrift on great oceans of instinct. Nobody is breeding them for intelligence, and it shows.
They’re damn amusing to watch, though.
I like to think of them as little robots. They have a very specific set of formatting that is intricate in it’s way, but isn’t very adaptable.
Little robots with feathers.
I like lording over a group of them, pretending they are actually doing my evil bidding.
“You there! Eat that slug! And you! Dust bathe, you cretin. Excellent. <steeples fingers>”
Ok, I’m simple. I admit it.
I was watching a science documentary last night, and they announced that they were going to perform an autopsy on a dinosaur. They lifted the sheet from the autopsy table, to reveal a turkey that looked like it had just been stolen from someone’s dinner table.
It’s a bit weird to realize that the dinosaurs never completely disappeared, and that we are surrounded by their descendants.
I choke my chicken alot is that bad for it? 
Unbearable cuteness from Japan
Must watch whole thing for maximum effect.
I had a surprise tonight when I came home from work, 4 chicks in the barn! A red hen had been sitting on some eggs but usually nothing comes from this except a bad smell. Tonight I hear this cheeping while feeding the chickens and there is a small feather ball running around. I left them with their mother but may move them tomorrow. I have read that the other chickens may attack the chicks but I do not want to seperate them from the mother and she is still sitting on a bunch of eggs on the floor in the roost.
Any thoughts?
take care
Bob Z
NE Pa
What kind of setup do you have for your birds? And how many total chickens? If they have enough space, the mom should be able to keep her brood safe. Well, more accurately, the chicks will be able to run away from the adults if they need to.
Did you find shells? Is it possible that the clutch she’s sitting on actually belongs to another hen, and all of her’s are hatched?
Where did she find a rooster? It would have to have been recently. The sperm only lived in the female’s reproductive tract for a couple of weeks.
And where are the pictures already???
Roughly 18 hens, ( too hard to count), one red rooster. We started with 24 but have lost a few, the rooster was a surprise.
Free Range, they sleep in a stall in the barn on some poles I put up. They are not locked in and they lay eggs all over.
The hen is sitting on a pile of eggs in the corner and the chicks are under her. I just seperated that corner from the rest of the stall with some chicken wire. We have had chickens for a couple of years but this is the first clutch that hatched. There are now 5 chicks, four red, one black. The hen and the rooster are red so at least one of the eggs were from the black chickens. We have some reds, whites, and black. I just bought some chick feed this am so the sectioned off corner has chick feed, water, and corn for the hen.
Bob Z
Sounds like a very quaint setup!
Now that you mention it, I don’t know much about feather color inheritance in chickens. It is possible that the black chick is really hers. Will double check.
Sounds like you’ve got a good arrangement. Make sure the chick feed is set so mom can reach it too. Corn isn’t nutritionally complete enough for it to be her only food source for the next couple weeks
Nest boxes in the stall where they roost may encourage the hens to put their eggs where you can find them. Then you won’t have so many surprise hatchings.
Pictures??
Pullet
Thanks for the thread. I never knew chickens were this interesting. OK, a couple of questions from Thailand.
I was in Thailand a few months ago and a friend took me to the Black Chicken Restaurant. It’s a restaurant specializing in some kind of chicken that has very dark meat and even the bones seem dark. Is this a special breed or did they do something to the meat, like dye it?
When my daughter was quite small we saw what I think were chickens around a Buddhist temple. She referred to them as “Emperor Chickens” as they seemed to be very proud birds. These were quite large birds and were an iridescent, blue-black. Some of them had the ultra-long tails trailing behind them. I was wondering what these might have been and whether they would be fun to raise or good for eating and laying.
Regards and thanks again.
Testy
They probably served you a Silkie Chicken, which has black skin and mesentaries (the tissue inside around the organs). When cooked, it looks like this. Though the meat is usually white. The broth that they cooked your dinner in may have colored the meat.
Silkie meat is considered to have special properties in a lot of Asian cultures and is used to make traditional medicines.
Hard to say for sure. There are a lot of different kinds of pheasant that come from Asia. Was it something like this?. Pheasants and chickens are in the same category of Gallinaceous birds. On the other hand, chickens can be found everywhere there are people, so it’s possible what you saw was a legitimate chicken.
Pullet
Thanks for the info on the Silkies. That’s probably what it was.
As far as the “Emperor Chickens” go, it definitely wasn’t a pheasant. This was a substantially larger bird and had a much longer tail that dragged on the ground. The tail was several times the length of the body. I think these things were being raised just because they were beautiful. I couldn’t imagine eating one. In any event, they were running around loose.
Thanks again and best regards
Testy
Hey. Do you recognize the name E.L. Stubbs? 