The Backyard Chicken Keeper's Handbook: Everything You Need to Raise Healthy, Happy Chickens at Home

Keeping backyard chickens looks simple until the coop is built wrong, the wrong breed struggles through your first winter, or a health problem goes unnoticed for two days too long. The Backyard Chicken Keeper's Handbook is the practical, no-fluff guide built to get a beginner from "we want >Inside, you'll find: Everything you need to choose the right flock -- how many birds to start with, ten popular breeds compared side by side for egg output, temperament, and cold hardiness, and how to pick a purpose (eggs, meat, or >Real numbers for building the coop and run: square footage per bird, ventilation requirements, roost and nesting box dimensions, and the predator-proofing details -- hardware cloth, buried aprons, raccoon-proof >A complete care system: feed types by age, daily and weekly routines, month-by-month egg production explained, seasonal care through every weather extreme, and a full chapter on raising chicks from incubation to >A dedicated troubleshooting guide, built the way you'd actually use it at 7 a.m. before work -- symptom, likely cause, what to check, what to do -- >First-week, daily, weekly, coop-cleaning, and winter-prep checklists you can run through instead of trying to remember it all, plus sample record >Whether you're bringing home your first three hens or finally building the coop you've been planning for years, this handbook gives you the real, practical answers -- not just the encouragement.