Brush up on your weird chicken facts and WOW the people around you!
About Chickens
A chicken’s heart beats 280-315 beats per minute
A chicken travels up to 9 miles per hour
A chicken looses feathers when stressed
The amount of waste products from the lifetime of one chicken
could produce enough electricity to light a
100 watt light bulb for 5 hours
There are more than 150 varieties of domestic chickens
Chickens CAN fly! The longest recorded distance is 301.5 feet
There are more chickens in the world than any other bird
Chickens can live 5 to 7 years (depending on breed)
The chicken who holds the record for living the longest lived 16 years
and died from a heart attack.
Chickens experience REM sleep
Bantam chickens have black skin and black bones
Mike, a headless rooster, lived for two years in fame in the 1940’s
(after his owner chopped his head off, but Mike didn’t die) Read more about
Mike here.
About Chicken Eggs
It takes approximately 4 pounds of chicken food for a chicken
to lay a dozen eggs
It takes 21 days for chicken eggs to hatch
Baby chicks peck out of the egg-shell with an ‘egg tooth’
A chicken lays its first eggs around 6-7 months old
Chickens lay an average of 5-7 eggs per week
The World Record for chicken laying was set in 1979
by a White Leghorn who laid 371 eggs in 364 days.
A hen does not need a rooster to lay eggs
(although a rooster is needed to fertilize eggs)
A hen’s eggs get larger as she gets older
The number of eggs a hen lays decreases each year older she gets
The largest recorded egg laid by a chicken was 12 ounces
and measured 12.25 inches around
The record number of yolks found in one egg was nine
More than one chicken can come from one egg
Chickens lay their eggs large end first
Tiny eggs laid by hens are called “Fart Eggs” or “Wind Eggs”. They were once thought to be laid by roosters because they’re generally yolk-less.
American’s Love Affair with Chickens
American’s consume 8 billion chickens per year
(this translates into 55-65 lbs per person per year)
There are more than 450 million chickens in the US
Chickens sold in the grocery store are 5 to 8 weeks old
If all the chickens eaten at KFC were lined up end to end,
they’d circle the Earth 11 times.