Chicken Trivia, Fun and Facts

Although chickens aren’t the most glamourous of all birds they play a big part in the lives of many people across the world. There are actually more chickens on earth than there are people. If you just hate chickens, though, you may be Alektorophobic.

Even if you don’t like chickens you may find some of these facts intriguing. For example, the chicken is the closest living relative to the T-Rex. There are over 3 billion chickens in China alone. Some breeds of chickens can lay colored eggs. The Ameraucana and Araucana can lay eggs of green or blue.

The most eggs laid by a chicken in one day is seven. If you make the chickens think it’s daylight, even at night, they’ll lay eggs that are bigger with harder shells. The largest recorded size of a chicken egg was 12 oz and measured 12-1/4″ in diameter. The greatest number of recorded yolks in one egg was 9.

A chicken can travel 9 miles an hour. This is usually a combined effort of running, jumping and flying. Chickens, like other birds and mammals, experience rapid eye movement (REM) when they sleep. And, chickens have over 200 distinct noises they can make for communicating.

Chickens and turkeys have crossbred many times. They call these “Turkins”. The chicken pox weren’t named after chickens or anything to do with chickens. The name came from an old English expression “gican pox”, meaning “itching pox”.

Kentucky Fried Chicken’s consumers eat enough chickens for them to be laid end to end and circle the equator eleven times. The same amount of chickens would also equal the distance from earth to over 50,000 miles past the moon.

When there is no rooster in a flock of hens one hen will take over the role – as much as possible – and will begin to crow and stop laying eggs. The waste produced by just one chicken can supply enough electricity to run a hundred-watt lightbulb for about five hours.

In Ancient Rome someone who said to you “You were raised by a hen”, was giving you a compliment. The expression “Mother hen”, also implies that a chicken makes a great mother.