Thinking of getting backyard chickens or already have a flock? Chances are you’re still “winging it” on some aspects of chicken care. We sat down with Dr. Maurice Pitesky, a UC Davis veterinarian and poultry expert, to discuss his new book, Dr. Cluck’s Backyard Chickens. The book is a lighthearted, comical, and essential reference designed to convey the best science regarding husbandry, nutrition, and welfare. Learn why Marek’s disease is the number one killer of backyard birds (and how to prevent it), the crucial “5% rule” for treats, and the surprising truth about the notorious backyard egg-washing debate. Get ready to ditch the guesswork and learn the science-backed secrets to successfully raising your backyard flock.
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Beyond The Coop: Science-Backed Secrets For Healthy Backyard Chickens With Dr. Maurice Pitesky, AKA “Dr. Cluck”
Welcome to the show. Janet, several of our friends have chickens as pets, and the kids carry them around. They name them. We have our own Dr. Cluck, Dr. Maurice Pitesky, who is our favorite chicken expert. He has a new book, Dr. Cluck’s Backyard Chickens, which is a fabulous reference from beginning to end on how to adopt chickens, what you feed them, how to house them, and what you do with the eggs.
All that stuff that we have no clue about. Even as a veterinarian, Janet, if you asked me a question about chickens, I would be emailing Dr. Pitesky ASAP. Anyway, Dr. Pitesky from UC Davis, you guys have got to get the book, Dr. Cluck’s Backyard Chickens. You can actually submit questions to Dr. Cluck if you have a question about your chickens. We will get into that. Welcome Dr. Pitesky. It’s so great to see you again.
Great, thanks for having me on again. It is great to be here.
Tell us about the characters in the book, because it is a how-to book.
There is humor, too.
It is a comical, lighthearted book. Tell us about the characters and how they came to be.
The Goal And Characters Of Dr. Cluck’s Backyard Chickens
The whole concept of the book is that there are a lot of backyard chicken books already out there. What we really wanted to do, Evan Adler, who is also a veterinarian, and I, is we really wanted to identify what the best science is. We are at a university. It is our job not only to do research, but also to convey what works and does not work to the general public. There was not really a book in the backyard poultry space that really covered what the research says with respect to apple cider vinegar or fermented feed, or what types of antibiotics work, or the best way to raise chicks and husbandry, and all those types of things, like how to protect your flock from predators.
We wanted to identify the best available science. As a university, our responsibility is not only to conduct research, but also to communicate what works—and what doesn’t—to the public. Share on XWe really wanted to focus on getting that accurate information across. To your point, Janet, about making it fun and having characters, we wanted to make it fun, funny, and enjoyable to read so people could read it when they want to really focus on a specific topic, but people could also read it as part of a coffee table book and just kind of something humorous. We do have all these different characters. Dr. Cluck is the straight guy who tries to steer everyone in the right direction. We have got this character, Henrietta. Most backyard poultry owners raise their backyard birds for eggs.
Henrietta is actually a broiler breed. She has to hide that from everyone because the broiler breeds just do not produce as many eggs, and she is afraid that she is going to get culled, for example. We have another character, Clara, who is dear to my heart, who is a wonderful Polish breed. She is this know-it-all. If you guys remember Cliff Clavin from Cheers, she is the one who says everything wrong, but says it with such confidence that everyone is like, “Clara must be right.” We have another character, Betsy, who is like this little bantam and is a little firecracker.
She is the Bart Simpson one, always getting into trouble. We have Gloria, who is also one of my favorites. Gloria is a hypochondriac. Gloria is always convinced that she has got Marek’s disease or avian influenza or whatever is going on. We have Boots. All you ever see is Boots’s boots, and that is the owner. Boots has a good heart but does not always do everything right. Little Boots is Little Boots’ child, and you will see some Little Boots there. Every chapter starts off with a one-page-long cartoon with about 5 to 8 different panes in it. It is just telling a story about biosecurity and nutrition, or welfare, or eggs, or hatching.
It is supposed to be a little silly and goofy, but it gets you into that topic. One way to read the book is just to read all the cartoons at the beginning of each chapter, and then to look at some of the cartoons, like these just one single cartoons that are buried within each chapter that still have those same characters and are meant to poke fun at the characters and chickens in general, because chickens are just kind of silly. That is the big picture there. It has been a fun project to work on.
We have a wonderful illustrator, Will, who is just brilliant. I used to joke with him that whenever I would go to his office, he would have fewer and fewer pictures of his kids and more and more pictures of the characters that he was working on. It has been a great project for Evan, Will, and me. It has finally come out, which is great. It is the first book I have ever written. It was not on my bingo board of things to accomplish in my life, but hopefully, other opportunities are moving forward.
Janet, so many people in science that we have interviewed on this show end up publishing a book without any intention of doing so. I love that because that is sharing all of their knowledge with us. Janet, you and I, we were raised in the city. We do not know anything about chickens. Where would I buy baby chicks if I wanted to?
Hold on. Our story growing up in Cleveland is that every Easter on Good Friday, we did not know where my dad went, but he would drive to some farm. We have probably told you this. He would drive to some farm, and he would come home either with ducklings or little chicks. We had ducklings.
I do not ever remember chicks. We had chicks, Romeo, Juliet, and Phoebe.
I had Wyatt, who was my bunny. We hatched chicks at school, the egg-turning thing. Anyway, dad would bring home ducks or rabbits, and all the neighborhood kids would come down, and we would feed them and dress them up and play with them and create a house out of cardboard boxes for maybe three weeks. They mysteriously went back to the farm. We did not know what we were doing. Let us face it, back then, there were no references out, let alone no fun references like what you are doing. Where would we buy, if we are very interested in this, first I guess we need a shelter, because you do not want to go buy chicks and not have anywhere to put them. Start at the beginning.
Literally, that is how we start the book, basically like, if you are interested or curious, you can start thinking, “If I am going to have backyard chickens, what do I need? How much space do I need? What is my coop going to look like? What are the things that are around my backyard that I need to be aware of? They might have harborage for rodents, for example, or maybe you have owls and other raptors that are flying overhead. What are all the things that you need to think about? What kind of time commitment is it? Where am I going to get birds or chicks? Am I going to start from the beginning and get hatching eggs?”
All those things we talked about in the beginning. Do I have a veterinarian? As we all know, that is a real problem in the US. We do not have enough, and we are working on this at UC Davis, among other vet schools. We do not have enough commercial poultry vets, but we also do not have enough small animal vets that do dog and cat stuff, who know just a little about chickens. Actually this book, what I really enjoy about working with people who have backyard birds is that we do not really train our vet students yet to really know how to treat and know the basic husbandry of poultry.
This book can actually be used all the way from kids to adults to vet students to veterinarians. It is really meant to be accessible and enjoyable for a large group, with the goal of ultimately making sure that we are all using the best science in order to figure out what works best. What works best for some people might be as simple as buying chicks at a feed store. We walk you through, as if you are going to buy your chicks at a feed store, make sure the feed store, for example, is vaccinating those chicks against Marek’s disease.
Marek’s Disease Prevention: The Number One Killer Of Backyard Birds
If they are not vaccinating against Marek’s disease, you need to ask them. If I tell the feed store, as a professor, “You guys need to vaccinate your chicks against Marek’s disease,” they are going to roll their eyes at me because I am not the customer. If the customer becomes more knowledgeable, that is gold. The reality is, a disease like Marek’s disease, which is 99% preventable, is the number one killer of backyard birds in the US.
What does it do? Is it Marek?
Yeah, Marek with an apostrophe S.
How do they get it?
It is a viral disease, a herpes virus. Actually, just one little joke, one of my professors in vet school always joked that there are two things you can never get rid of. One is herpes viruses like Marek’s disease, and the other is land in Pullman, Washington. He would always joke that he had one of those.
He would not tell us which one. Did he want to sell you that land? See, that would have been a good question.
The Marek’s disease virus actually is a herpes virus, and it can persist for a long time in the environment. There is a very effective vaccine that you can actually buy over the counter. We talk about in the book how to give the vaccine. We have made a video on YouTube that we have got the hyperlink to in the book. You can learn how to do that, or you can have your feed store do it, or have your vet do it. Just reaching out to feed stores and saying, “I just read in this book by these veterinarians that we need to start asking for this vaccine. Do you guys do that?”
That is the way that we nudge the industry, the backyard poultry hatcheries and feed stores, to start vaccinating. It is super easy to do. If I were really going to pick one thing that I really want people to focus on, that would be it. That is preventable, and the commercial poultry industry, to their credit, actually does a really good job with Marek’s. On the backyard side, that is where we need to do a little better job.
I live in a small town, and it is called Hinckley, Ohio. You cannot go two blocks without seeing fresh eggs for sale. I have to tell you, when we are done taping this, Janet, I am sharing this YouTube with the Hinckley community area, so you can do that because I want to make sure these people are doing right by these chickens.
I think chicken, whatever you call it, taking care of chickens or having chickens, started getting hot during COVID when people were doing the victory gardens, and then the egg prices increased and all that, because I live in the suburbs outside of Manhattan and there are a lot of chicken coops in these backyards when I am walking around. I saw one the other day, I was at someone’s house, and I could see it there. There was a big, puffy red one in there. That is my other question. You can get chicks, but they are like exotic chickens.
We talk about this in the book. There are over 300 different breeds of chicken. If you look at the commercial world, there are just a handful. There are a few breeds that are very productive and have very low feed conversion ratios. They are machines, but in the backyard world, you do not buy backyard chickens. We talk about this in the book. You do not buy backyard chickens to save a few pennies or nickels or dimes on eggs. It does not pencil out for all kinds of reasons, in part because the feed is just too expensive.
Egg prices right now are super low, so this would not be the time right now to say, “I’m going to get five-layer hens, and I’m going to save money.” People like the process, and they like having, either with themselves or their families, they like having food in their backyard, whether it’s fruits and vegetables. To your point, Janet, now people are getting much more keen and excited about backyard chickens and the eggs that they produce. Some are even pushing into the meat space. We talk about that.
What are the ways that you might want to process your layer bird when she is older and not very productive anymore, for meat versus euthanasia, which is a much different thing? Some people are starting to rise. They are starting to actually find backyard breeds that are a little better for meat, and they are raising those and processing them or working with mobile processing units, and all kinds of, I would say, parallel business models are evolving around this niche of backyard chickens.
We are at a time where hopefully a book like this informs people, not just those who have the birds, but also those who work on vaccines or processing and things like that. We can all do our part to make sure that the best science is helping guide us when it comes to welfare, food safety, husbandry, nutrition, and all those different things.
You need a chicken coop. What do you need to start? You need a coop, you need a run. How much space do you need?
Raising Chicks In A Brooder And Transition To The Coop
We talk about that. The most common scenario is that people will buy their chicks, basically one-to-three-day-old chicks, at a feed store, and then they will bring them home. What you first need is you need to identify, in case a disaster happens, who your vet is, right? You have a veterinarian, because that’s not trivial to find. Dr. Cluck is always available, but Dr. Cluck cannot prescribe medications from California. He does not want to do it that way. Yeah, or see your chicken or things like that.
It is really key to have a relationship with someone like Dr. Cluck, but it is also really important to have a vet flagged just in case a disaster happens. If you are going to do the most common route of having those chicks, then you need a brooder. A brooder is just basically a nice warm area to raise those chicks after they hatch for the next 4 to 6 weeks, depending on the climate outside. Because when the chicks are born, they cannot really thermoregulate very well. They cannot keep themselves very warm.
The brooder is basically just a heat lamp and a nice circular space, usually in your garage or somewhere semi-temperature-controlled where there are no big winds and things like that. You are putting starter feed and water in the brooder lamp, and you are just making sure those birds are nice and warm. If they are too warm, if the lamp is emitting too much heat, you will actually see the birds go to the edges of the brooder, for example. If they are too cold, they will huddle together. We talk about that in the book.
What are the things you want to look for? Because you want to follow the directions, but you also want to use your eyes and your head, just like when we are working with vet students, we want them to be aware of what they are supposed to do, but also what the reality is. During those four to six weeks, we are slowly lowering the temperature because they are getting hardier and they do not need as much heat. We start off at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit and then slowly ramp down each week. The first thing you need is a brooder.
When working with veterinary students, we want them to understand not only what they are expected to do, but also what the real-world reality is. Share on XYou need a brooder lamp, you need feeders and waterers, and we talk about all those things. After 4 to 6 weeks, they go into the coop. The rookie mistake that some people make, going back to the brooder really quickly, is that they will bring their birds home, and then they will be like, “I need to put the brooder lamp on.” It takes a little while to get that nice warm temperature there. You want to do that before you bring your chicks home. After those 4 to 6 weeks, the birds can go outside in your coop.
Where this also gets a little complicated is that some people already have their own backyard birds. You are trying to think about what are the strategies you can use to integrate those new chicks into your current flock? We go over some recommendations there. If you’re starting from scratch, then it is a much easier transition, and you are just moving those birds to your point, Janet, about space. Space is important. We talk about our space recommendations inside the coop and in the run. My one thought is, do not always use space as the end-all be-all.
It is also what kind of entertainment and enrichment you have. If you give your kids more space, but there are no new toys, they are not going to do much. Having those enrichments is really key. Enrichments are really important because that is one of the ways that the birds get, which you can reduce any inter-flock drama. There are drama llamas. There is a pecking order. That is why they call it a pecking order. One of the ways we can reduce that, especially if you have a rooster or two, which, depending on the community, you can have, one of the ways to reduce the tension and the inter-flock drama is by having lots of enrichments and those types of things.
To your space point, in the run outside the coop, you want about two to four feet per bird. In the coop, I am trying to remember what we recommended. I believe we said one and a half to three feet or something on there. I will have to double-check, in all honesty. Again, you need things like perches, because perches are really important to allow their prey species’ instinct. They need that perch at night to perch on so they can be comfortable while they are sleeping. We go over all the different recommendations on perches.
As I was talking to my sister, who is a retired astrophysicist. She is brilliant, and I cannot keep up with her. She was reading the book, and she said, “I didn’t realize this is like basically the astrophysics of raising chickens.” It is not meant to be, but just because she is an infovore, she will try to capture all the different pieces of information and try to connect them together to understand what is the best way to raise these birds.
What about entertainment? Wait for entertainment, do they like HBO, The Real Housewives?
Besides the little boxes they can go into, what kind of entertainment do they like?
I would say for backyard birds, the lucky thing for us is that you do not have to do much. First of all, they do not do well by themselves. When we think about minimum numbers, you do not want one. You do not want one, do not get two. If you get two, disaster is going to happen, and then you are back down to one bird.
Do they kill each other?
No, well, that can happen. What I am saying is, let us say you have two birds and just one dies of Marek’s disease or whatever. Now you are down to one, and now you are in a spot where that bird is. They are very social, and they need to be around other birds. Three, just anecdotally and based on my experience working with backyard birds, is probably the minimum number that you want. To your entertainment point, something as simple as just a bale of straw or hay that is dangling down, they love that. They love that. We try to keep the treats to a minimum.
The 5% Rule For Treats And Chicken Nutrition
I am a veterinarian, and I love animals. I can look at my dog, cats, or pigs, and I could be like, “That’s the sweetest thing in the world,” and I give them cookies because they are spoiled. I look at chickens, and I do not want to give them chicken scratch. It does not remind me that I am going to give them food. People love to give them things like insects, like black soldier fly larvae. It has become a really big thing. We talk about that. The only thing I recommend is that when you are giving treats, but people love to give treats, it is not ideal because you are basically just giving lots of carbs with chicken scratch, so minimize it to about 5% of their daily ration.
If we are dealing with an adult laying hen, they are going to eat about 120 or 130 grams of feed, basically about a half a cup of feed a day. You cannot go over that 5% rule because if you keep on going over 5%, you have to remember that they are pooping out basically an egg a day. That egg has about 4 to 5 grams of calcium in it. If you are displacing this perfectly formulated layer ration with all this calcium in it, and you are displacing that and giving them basically carbs from chicken scratch, now you are going to start having soft eggs. When you start having soft eggs and things like that, disaster can happen.
They can actually die if one of those eggs cracks inside them. That is a real problem, because E. coli then starts coming in, and there is not much you can do at that point. When it comes to nutrition, we all love to spoil our animals. I am guilty of that, but we just need to be a little cautious. In a perfect world, just give them the layer ratio. They will get insects and all kinds of stuff from just interacting with the environment because they have got a coop and they have got a run, and there is just all kinds of stuff going on. If you must, just try to keep it at that 5%-ish.
I never realized that. I am part of this greenhouse group where we grow plants, and we put chicken scratch on top of the seeds that we are growing in the dirt because it keeps little gnats and bugs away. Interesting. Isn’t that wild? They are like, “We’re putting chicken scratch on top,” and I am like, “Really?” We sprinkle it on top of the little seedlings you start, and it keeps the bugs away. I do not know why, but it works. Isn’t that nutty? It’s weird.
When they do lay eggs, I remember in Florida, we had friends who had an egg farm, and they always had to wash the eggs. What does that mean?
The washing of the eggs is, I joke with people, there are three things you do not talk about in polite company. We talk about this in the book. You do not talk about politics, religion, or whether or not to wash your backyard chicken eggs. People get so passionate about this topic. It is interesting. In the United States, if you sell commercial eggs, you have to wash your eggs. The United States, Japan, and Australia are the three countries where you have to wash your eggs to sell them commercially.
Because of what?
It’s because on the outside of the egg, there are bacteria. Most of those bacteria are harmless, but there are bacteria there. In the United States, the way we deal with those bacteria, let’s say we’re dealing with, God forbid, Salmonella or some types of what we call pathogenic E. coli and things like that, we do not want them. In the United States, the way we deal with that is we require our eggs to be washed, and then they go in the refrigerator at the store. That is great, that is one solution. If you’re in other parts of the world, like folks who have traveled to Southeast Asia or Europe, you’ll see eggs that are a little dirty.
The eggs are laid, there is actually this thing called a cuticle or a bloom on the outside, and that actually has some antibacterial properties to it. It is almost like a cultural thing. Some parts of the world trust the bloom because when you wash the egg as we do, you wipe off that bloom. There are arguments for and against, and like I said, we could spend, believe it or not, hours going back and forth on this. For backyard birds, I tell people not to wash their eggs. The reason I tell them not to wash their eggs is that when people wash them, the eggs are porous.
They actually have about 10,000 little tiny holes in them. When you wash them, a lot of people dunk them in water. I was actually watching one YouTube video where the lady is like, “They tell me not to dunk them, but I dunk them anyway,” and I am like, “Oh my God.” When you dunk them, that has a tendency to drive bacteria through those pores into the egg. I would say and we go over the ways that you can wash your eggs if you feel it necessary to wash your eggs. We live in a country of abundance.
If people have poop on their eggs, you could make an argument, and we talk about this, you could make an argument to let the poop dry, and then take a little piece of sandpaper, and then wipe off the outside of the egg with one of these commercial backyard egg-washing solutions. That is totally legit. Because we live in such abundance, I just tell people, “Just throw that egg out. If you have a lot of eggs that have poop on them, then we have got a problem, and we need to deal with that.”
Because we live in such abundance, I usually tell people: “Just throw the egg out. If you’re consistently getting eggs with feces on them, then we have a problem—and we need to address it.” Share on XThat is not normal. I feel like sometimes we’re arguing about these one percent type issues. Why are we getting so much if we’re having 50% of our eggs that have poop on them because they’re not laid in the nest box, for example, or our coop is dirty? That is the issue, not so much the symptom of having a lot of eggs with poop on them.
What do they wash them in?
It’s kind of like a dilute bleach solution. There are some disinfectants. There are different ones, but basically, some kind of disinfectant.
Refrigerate or not refrigerate?
The Egg Washing Debate And Refrigeration
That is the next question. If we were in other parts of the world, we might not refrigerate. When you go to parts of Europe, for example, you will see the eggs dirty and on the shelf, which is very strange to us because we are used to clean, fresh eggs. It is funny whenever we sell, let’s say, there is some opportunity for our layer industry to sell eggs to Mexico, they actually do not like our eggs because they are too clean. They look like they came out of robots or machines to them. They actually like them a little dirty. Just gives them confidence that it came from a real farm or things like that.
Refrigeration is great, as I think a lot of us know, in the sense that bacteria, the E. coli and the Salmonella, can actually grow orders of magnitude faster at room temperature versus in a refrigerator. God forbid you have Salmonella inside your egg in the yolk, where there is lots of nutrition. It is not just having Salmonella, but it is having enough to actually cause disease. If there is one in there, your immune system will be fine. If there are 10,000 in there, you are going to get sick if you are exposed to that raw egg.
As we all know, if you cook the eggs to 165 degrees, just like meat, just like poultry meat, you will be fine, but I am one of those people who like a runny egg, just like a lot of other folks. Out of an abundance of caution, it makes all the sense in the world in our country with a very stable electric grid to put your eggs in the refrigerator. In other parts of the world, they will not put them in the refrigerator because the electricity is not as stable.
If you keep on going from hot to cold, hot to cold, hot to cold, that actually draws bacteria in because of the way that the physiology and the anatomy of the egg work. You are creating this opportunity for the bacteria on the outside to basically be sucked through those pores. In other parts of the world, we can have a slightly more nuanced conversation, but here, not washing them, but putting them in the fridge would be my recommendation. Over 5% of your eggs have dirt on them, so we probably should send Dr. Cluck an email, or you can read the book or Google around to learn more about why that is happening.
How old are the chickens, the hens, before they start laying eggs?
They are chicks for about six weeks, and then they become pullets, like teenagers, a little unruly and a little attitude looking. They are not the best looking at that point, and then they blossom into these hens around twenty weeks of age, but the eggs can be a little small. They can sometimes be double-yolkers, where you have two yolks in there. Those are actually illegal because the farms are supposed to remove them from the supply. I think because you’re probably getting twice the cholesterol, if I had to guess.
How do you know?
It is really incredible. If you ever go onto these farms, there are a million birds and tens of thousands of eggs coming down these assembly lines. They can candle them. You can do this yourself, you can take the flashlight from your cell phone and look at the eggs. Actually, that is one of the ways, if you want to complicate your life, as many of us do, and you want to be the gold star student, you can actually incubate your hatching eggs.
Using that cell phone, we have got pictures in here from a wonderful vet who does a lot of commercial work on hatching eggs. We have these amazing, beautiful photographs of what you are looking for at each stage of embryo development. That is really important because you want to make sure you have a good, not just a high percentage of eggs that are hatching, but you want to make sure that those chicks are nice and healthy when they finally hatch from the incubator.
I feel lucky when I get one of those from the grocery store eggs.
I know. It’s still a little dead, I’m going to put it in.
I know. I am on your side. I feel like that is a great business opportunity for someone to sell double-yolkers. We actually even talked about that there was a triple-yolker. In our footnotes, which are supposed to be these fun facts, we talked about the probability of getting a triple-yolker. We commented that if you ever get a triple-yolker, you need to immediately drop everything and go get a lottery ticket.
That’s a jackpot.
That is very rare. The double-yolkers look a little bigger. If you are ever suspect, you can take your cell phone flashlight.
If you live in a seasonal area, like winter, and we had a bad winter, really bad winter. What happens to those chickens in the winter? Where do I put them?
They are actually pretty hardy. It is interesting because you will see every single winter, unfortunately, on social media, you will hear these really bad stories about people using some kind of space heater to heat their coop, and they set it and forget it. Imagine you are in a coop, it is cold, but it is also very dry, and you have got a lot of dander and almost a kindling stuff that is in there. Every single winter, you hear a story about a coop burning down. I know we all want our birds to be comfortable and warm. They do actually really, really well in the winter.
They do not produce as many eggs for all kinds of reasons. They huddle together, they eat more, and they do not produce as many eggs or any eggs if they are molting. They do actually well. What I am concerned about. I am from Davis, California, where our summers are really hot, and I worry a little more about the summers sometimes than I do about the winter, especially for these big, hardy breeds. As we all know, some of us spoil our pets, so our pets are a little on the plump side. We go over how to identify that and what the strategies are to reduce that. If they are a little obese, especially in the summertime, that is more body weight to cool down, and that can be challenging.
You can set up misters. Those have advantages and disadvantages. You can actually take the bird, and if they will tolerate it, and I have had good success with this, where you take the bird, and you put it in a relatively cool, not freezing, kind of tank of water, just to cool off the outside of them. You can also put some ice cubes in their waterers and things like that. I have seen it where some of these, especially more obese birds, will have some, at the minimum, be stressed, you will see some open-mouth breathing. I have seen it and heard from people where it has, unfortunately, resulted in mortality.
What is the cost of chickens? The coop, the food, right? Fresh water, the vaccine, but also how often do you have to keep that coop pretty clean, I am assuming?
The highest cost that you are going to have is at the beginning when you are setting up your coop and your brooder, and those things can last for a long time. The other main cost that you will have moving forward on the operating side is feed. That is usually about 70% of your operating cost, and feed is basically corn and soybeans. Feed is going to be by far the most expensive thing that you are going to have as far as your costs.
We used to have this wonderful community backyard tour, go from place to place with all kinds of biosecurity steps in there to prevent disease transmission, but people would show off their coops, and you would have these wonderful, beautiful coops that are more for the owners, obviously, than the birds. You can just go to the equivalent of Costco or Amazon, and you can order these things now. All kinds of great opportunities. The most important thing to do is to use material that is easy to clean. Sometimes we focus on all the different disinfectants and things like that, and we can have a whole conversation about that.
Perhaps the most important part is what we call dry cleaning. That is just getting all that feather dander and dust off of your coop. To your point about poop, most birds are actually pretty fastidious. If you have litter, like sometimes I am from California, so we have lots of rice hulls, but some people use other kinds of litter material, and we talk about the advantages and disadvantages of all different types of litter, but they will actually rototill the poop into the litter, and it basically breaks down and composts.
When you walk inside the coop, you should not smell a strong smell of ammonia. That is bad for us, that is bad for the birds. You do not have to treat it like a litter box, per se, where you have to go in there every day and take the poop out. If those kinds of things are happening, if it smells bad, if it is really poopy in there, those are things to think about, like, “What am I doing wrong? Is it a density issue? Do I have too many birds in this space? Do I have too few litter? Do I not have any litter at all, which is a common thing? Now I need to put some litter in there, what are the potential solutions to science it out?”
Isn’t it just straw or no?
No, actually, straw is great for nest boxes because we do not want the egg to come out and crack. Straw is actually not very absorbable, so I actually do not like straw on the ground at all. I like something much more absorbable. Things like rice hulls, for example, are wonderful for that purpose.
Are they picky about their diet? Are they finicky?
I do not think so from what I have seen. What I do see is where people will have a good idea of where they will take some of their scraps, for example.
I would worry too about getting back to when you are talking about the feed. You want to buy the feed from a place that has good turnover, right?
Feed Costs And Rodent Control Strategy
Yeah, you are absolutely right. What we need to do on our end is we need to make sure that we are not buying so much feed that it is being stored for months at a time, because some of the vitamins can actually break down or oxidize. That is a problem, especially in chick feed. That is a real problem. We also want to make sure that we are storing the feed in a place where there are no rodents, or we are protecting ourselves against rodents. We talk about that in the book and poke fun at the rodent issue, but rodents love chicken feed.
We actually go over the different types of rodent poop, so you know what you are dealing with, because rodents are ubiquitous. We are humans, rodents are wherever humans are, and they definitely are wherever chickens are. We just need to make sure that we are protecting our feed because not only do the rodents eat the food, but they poop there, too. That is a great way to transmit a gazillion and one diseases. Controlling rodents is really fundamental. We talk about this in the book, even things as simple as when you look at a roof rat, a roof rat can jump from a tree 3 to 4 feet from the tree onto the top of your coop, and then work their way into the coop.
We talk about pruning your trees back more than 3 feet or so, so it makes it much harder for them to get into your coop and start spreading disease. The other thing is making sure that the perimeter, whether we are dealing with mice or rats, understanding where their nesting grounds are, and how far away they are from your coop, is actually really important and is a great way to help control or mitigate rodent issues. We talk about this in a book in an extensive fashion. There are different ways to control rodents.
Whether using baits, we talk about the advantages and disadvantages of that, whether you want to use organic poisons, whether you just want to use what are called tin cats, basically, little traps, to trap them and then dispose of them in different ways. We talk about all those different types of things, and there is no perfect solution, and rodents are ubiquitous. We are really just trying to mitigate their presence and the potential for disease spread.
What about mold in the food?
You probably cannot let that food get wet.
100%. That is really important. To your point about feed stores, some of us, especially in more remote areas, are going to have access to feed mills, which is great. I have noticed that if the feed mill does not have experience with poultry feed, that could be a really big problem in the sense that I was on one farm once, just as an example, where the feed should crumble in your hands. As a poultry vet, you will go onto a farm, you will put the feed in your hands, and you will try to make sure these pellets turn into a nice little dust.
If that does not happen, then they are basically making these pellets too hard, and they sometimes make them too hard because it’s for pig feed. They’re making poultry feed. It’s formulated like poultry feed, but the pellets are pelletized in the same way that they would pelletize pig feed. The chickens cannot basically digest those pellets because they do not have teeth. It is really important to work with a feed mill that does have experience with chick feed. Pellets are great.
They are easy to clean up, they are just a tiny bit more expensive, but they do not contribute to as much spillage and wastage. Pellets are great. It’s a good use of the limited resource of money when your birds are layers. It is also just really important to make sure you are working with a good feed source, which most of these feed mills are actually really good at. I have run into a few where there is this learning curve, trying to figure out how to pelletize the feed correctly for birds.
How do you go on vacation?
We talk about that again in the book. If you’re not there a lot, that’s a problem. Now I have seen some very clever solutions to that. In Davis, there was one couple, they were empty nesters aside from chickens, of course, and they built their coop across the fence line with their neighbor. It was brilliant. I thought it was a really clever solution. It was really just amazing. The other family was young. They had kids and things like that. It worked really well, actually. The empty nesters would take care of the birds the majority of the time, but when they wanted to go on vacations, grandkids, whatever, then they would coordinate with their neighbors in that way.
Tracking Production Data And Clean Water Management
That is one way, but obviously, just like when you have someone’s pet sitting, that is also something that can happen. As we all know, a disaster usually happens when you are away. We have all been there. Chickens are amazing animals in all kinds of ways, including the fact that, at some point, they become a relatively low-maintenance gig, and you are just getting eggs, and you are going out there. One thing I always tell people is, “Make sure you always go out at least twice a day and just observe,” because you really want to know, just like when we are in vet school, you want to know what normal is. When you see something abnormal, you know it.
The other thing to think about, and I know we all slack on this, is to keep just some basic logs of how many eggs they produced a week. When I get these phone calls, including from large commercial farms, they will tell me something is wrong, and I will be like, “Is our egg production down? Is our feed consumption wrong? What’s going wrong?” They are like, “I know something’s wrong, but I think it’s down a little.”
Keeping some data, which is great for kids. If you are a 4-H-er, we have some sheets in here that tell you what you want to start keeping track of, how much feed they are consuming a week, and how much water they are consuming. Sometimes the feed is going down, and you are like, “What’s going on?” It’s maybe because they do not have access to water. One of the rate-limiting steps of feed consumption is water. They drink twice as much as they eat.
One of the rate-limiting factors in feed intake is water. Birds drink about twice as much as they eat. If your waterers aren’t functioning properly and you’re not monitoring them, the first question shouldn’t be feed—it should be: what’s going on with… Share on XIf, for some reason, your waterers are not working and things like that, but you are not keeping track of that, then we have to try to figure out why they aren’t eating. What’s going on? When it’s hot out, for example, they will have decreased feed, just like we all do not want to eat as much when it’s hot out. There are so many different reasons, and just keeping some basic data, which we talk about, is also a great opportunity to start troubleshooting on your own what might be going on.
You just mentioned a waterer. Do you not have a bowl of water? Is there an actual waterer?
Is it like a thing with a tray under it? Is it like the hamster waterer with a tube?
There are a lot of different options, and water is a tricky one because you want the water to be clean, and birds are not always cooperative when it comes to water. Sometimes they want to perch on the waterers. There are these bell waterers, which are great, and they can be easily cleaned. There are these nipple drinkers, which I like a lot because it’s a little harder to contaminate the water from the nipple drinker. Pay attention to them. They can leak, and make sure that the nipple part is cleaned out periodically because you can get all kinds of biofilms in there, which is a problem. We all take it for granted, but water is not trivial.
We have fiddled around with all kinds of being at a university is great, I can work with all kinds of brilliant engineers. We fiddle around with hanging systems that are almost like a long cylinder of plastic. When it gets windy, they can start spilling water. When you have a lot of spillage of water, that creates a nice home for bacteria and parasites like coccidiosis and things like that. There is no perfect solution. Whatever you do, pay attention and stay on top of it. If you do not stay on top of it, whatever system you use is going to bite you back.
Janet, I have to ask a question about dermatology. Do you see a lot of lice or mites in chickens?
Yeah.
When I was working with pelicans, they all had lice. Lice stay on the pelican. They did not like me. Speak about that, Dr. Pitesky.
Controlling Lice And Mites With Diatomaceous Earth
You basically just identified the two biggest ectoparasites that we deal with, lice and mites. One of the great things about the book is that Evan, Adler, and I are all vets. We both work with a lot of poultry. We talk about what we talk about, but there are experts in poultry behavior. There is a wonderful professor who is a poultry entomologist at UC Riverside who really helped us when it comes to parasite control, because, full disclosure, that is not my area of expertise. I do not know that stuff.
She has done this remarkable work with diatomaceous earth and how diatomaceous earth can be efficacious as a dust bathing tool, not just as an enrichment, which we talked about a little earlier, and makes the birds really happy because they like to dust bathe, but also as a way to basically control mites. We talk about what the right types of sand and diatomaceous earth are and how to mix them up into the equivalent of a bigger litter box so you can control those. Those are very common.
Again, the most important part is setting it up correctly and then not just going away, but just periodically checking in on it. The only problem with the diatomaceous earth. Two small things. I get a little concerned because diatomaceous earth is very volatile, so I get a little concerned when there are young kids around and making sure that when we’re pouring more diatomaceous earth, grown-ups are being cautious.
The only other thing with diatomaceous earth that I get a little concerned about is just making sure that people are. I keep hearing how people sometimes just put it on the ground, and I am like, “Nope, that doesn’t work.” If you talk to Amy Murillo, whose name I am finally remembering, the wonderful poultry entomologist at UC Riverside, we have basically, working with her, really identified what the best practices are to control those two ectoparasites and identify ectoparasites.
Some ectoparasites are on the bird, some are in the coop and on the bird, and we go over the really common ones. She was a wonderful resource for that part of the book. We drew all kinds of life cycles, which, as people from vet school remember, was a slightly traumatic experience, but we made them fun and interesting. We focused on where in the life cycle you can make the biggest impact. We flagged that part of it as opposed to having these big complicated life cycles. Trying to make it a little funny too, of course.
I can just imagine her going to the DMV, and they ask her occupation. She says, “Poultry entomologist.”
I was joking with her once. She is the dream. That’s what she always wanted to do. I wanted to be an astronaut. She wanted to be a poultry entomologist.
I cannot believe your sister does not come up with these coops that remind me of catios. You know, Janet, where people have all these catio-type things. These people have these coops for their chickens and try to outdo one another. I cannot believe your astrophysicist sister has not developed a moon-shaped one or something like that.
I will call her after this.
Good.
It makes me want to have chicken friends.
No, I am worried. I want someone else to have the chickens because this sounds like, “I do not know that I could do all this and get it right.”
As we all know from vet school, the people who are doing it wrong are the ones, for some reason, that everything is going great. In all honesty, I am a big fan of that. We talk about this. Do not make perfect the enemy of good. If you are doing badly, then moderation is wonderful. You do not have to do everything here. No judgment one way or the other. It’s all about what works and doing the best you can, whatever that version of the best you can is. It does not have to be perfect, obviously. That’s a very good point.
Don’t make perfect the enemy of good. When things aren’t going well, moderation can be a strength. You don’t have to do everything at once—no judgment either way. It’s about what works and doing your best, whatever that looks like. It doesn’t have to… Share on XThe scaredy-cat that was outside did not want to come in because the dog was by the door. Literally went like, if this is the dog.
I wish we could have seen that.
I literally was like, “My gold just came over here.” Now I am dying to drive up to all these egg places that are for sale and say, “I’d like to take a look at your coop.” They will think I am some kind of nut, so.
We have got to wrap it up, but this has been fascinating. I might be getting a chicken coop. I have to talk to the person.
Janet, I know three people I am sending this book to, seriously.
That’s awesome.
Wonderful.
We have a friend, and she has a red chicken, and I remember the name is Scarlett, and I think that’s so cute.
We have to ask you a question, a guest question. What is your life’s theme song?
She always rolls her eyes at this.
I hate these questions.
I know, then come up with your own.
I am a big baseball fan, and I am thinking of what kind of walk-up music I would have, is the way I am interpreting it.
Sweet Caroline from the Boston Red Sox.
I like the Savannah Bananas. They are my new favorite.
Understood.
Love them.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
No, it has got to get you going, so you do a good batting stance.
Man, I do not know, I am going to think about this. I am a 52-year-old dad, so there are definitely some dad rock vibes going on right now.
Cheeseburger in Paradise.
I could do that. I do not know, I have to think about that. I have got to put some thought into that.
I got another one from the peanut gallery.
Anything Radiohead I like, if that is working.
That works. Thank you. This has been really enlightening, and we are going to put a picture of the book up and a link to the website.
I cannot wait to read the book, I am serious. I am buying four of them, one for me.
Thank you, Janet.
Thanks for having me on. As I said, Dr. Cluck is someone I can either confirm or deny who Dr. Cluck is, but I do look at Dr. Cluck’s emails, and I will respond to them. If people have any questions on the book, they can obviously email me, or they can email Dr. Cluck, and I am always willing to chat, email, phone, whatever.
That’s great.
The whole merchandise line around Mr. Cluck.
I know if there’s a feed store that’s listening, I want to make Dr. Cluck-branded poultry feed. All kinds of swag opportunities here. People are more artsy and creative than I am, I am sure.
Janet and I love swag. We cannot get enough of it.
We do. I predict a second and third book, I am telling you. I do.
You know what they say, “Be careful what you wish for, it might come true.”
That’s right.
You want more dad jokes, just let me know. I’ve got them all simmering in here.
There is something in there. She loves them.
Anyway, we’re going to wrap it up. Listen to all of you out there, feel free to submit questions on the webpage SOPPodcast.com. That is where we got so many of the questions for Dr. Pitesky.
Pictures of your pets and your coops, we could have a comparison. That would be fun.
Yes, we will judge coops. We will send them to Dr. Pitesky to see Janet, and which one gets the Dr. Cluck award?
That’s right. New award. Thanks for tuning in. Don’t forget to like, share, listen, and tell your friends about us. We appreciate you. We’ll see you next time. Thanks for tuning in.
Thanks, everyone.
Important Links
- Dr. Maurice Pitesky
- UC ANR – Our Team | Poultry
- Dr. Cluck’s Backyard Chickens
- Pitesky Lab at UC Davis
- Don’t wing it: Vets pen ‘Dr. Cluck’ book to help keep chickens healthy, safe
About Dr. Maurice Pitesky
Maurice Pitesky DVM, ACVPM
Associate Professor of Cooperative Extension
Poultry Health and Food Safety Epidemiology
Maurice Pitesky is an associate professor of cooperative extension at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine with an appointment in poultry health and food safety epidemiology. Dr. Pitesky earned his BS in biology from UCLA, and his DVM and MPVM from UC Davis. Pitesky is also boarded in Preventative Veterinary Medicine (DACVPM).
Pitesky’s academic research interests are focused in major areas:
- Using various epidemiological techniques and cartography to understand how avian diseases move in time and space.
- Using remote sensing such as weather radar, telemetry and satellite imagery for waterfowl predictive modeling around the world
- Disease modeling of avian diseases
- Using web-scraping and computational linguistics to understand the role of social media in sentiment associated with animal diseases
- Gaining a better understanding of small-scale poultry production with respect to environmental sustainability, poultry heath, and food safety.
Good a blog toper