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raising cockerels for meat or feathers, most of the chickens in your flock should be hens; a good average is one cock per 12 to 20 hens. If you have an excess of roosters, they’ll fight. If you don’t need fertilized eggs for hatching, or if the local zoning ordinance doesn’t allow roosters, you don’t need cocks at all — but you’ll miss out on their amusing antics.
THREE GOLDEN FLOCK-SIZE RULES
1. Keep no more chickens than you have space for.
2. Keep no more chickens than you have time to care for.
3. Keep no more chickens than you can afford to maintain.

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Fowl Disposition
    AS SOON AS YOU GET YOUR CHICKENS HOME, you will begin to notice several things you may find surprising:
    Each chicken has a distinct personality.
    Your chickens communicate with each other, and with you, using sounds that have specific meanings.
    Each individual bird has a unique tone of voice — even with your eyes closed, you can tell precisely which one is making the sounds you hear.
    All chicken breeds and varieties originated with ancient jungle fowl. In many ways modern chickens are still much like their ancestors, having retained some of their natural instincts, such as scratching the ground for food — something you’ll see chicks doing when they’re only a few hours old. In other ways they differ; some of today’s modern breeds no longer have the instinct to make a nest and hide their eggs and incubate them for 21 days until chicks appear. But chickens are like people — no two are exactly alike, and as soon as you make a statement about what all chickens do or don’t do, one comes along to prove you wrong.
Fowl Language
    Chickens make a lot of different sounds, and every one of them means something. Anyone who spends much time around chickens can tell by the sounds they make when they are frightened, contented, cautious, or a whole range of other emotions.
    Some scientists insist that the idea of chickens communicating through the sounds they make is mere
anthropomorphizing
— attributing human behavior toan animal. They cling to this notion because communicating through language is supposedly a major distinction between humans and animals. A few progressive scientists — most likely those having grown up with chickens before they became educated — spend their lives studying the sounds chickens make and seeking to understand what they mean.
Chicken Talk
    In the 1960s a German physician named Erich Baeumer identified 30 distinct sounds made by chickens. At about the same time, Nicholas E. Collias of the University of California in Los Angeles identified 24 calls made by red jungle fowl, from which most of our chicken breeds originated. The discrepancy may be attributed to the specific sounds each man identified as being distinct from other sounds.

    Chicks make a pleasant sound that says they feel warm and safe.
    To use a human example of the difficulty of identifying separate words, if you put your finger in front of your mouth and softly make the sound “shh,” you communicate a request for silence. If, on the other hand, you more forcefully hiss a short “shh!” you insist on instant silence. In both cases the sound “shh” means hush, but inflection conveys important differences in meaning. Where one person might consider them to be two distinct words with different meanings, another might consider them to be the same word uttered with different intensity.
    Animal behaviorist Chris Evans of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, is another researcher devoted to studying chicken communications. He points out that the conveying of information by the sounds chickens make reveals a complex and sophisticated system paralleling human language. Evans recognizes three similarities between chicken talk and human language:
    The ability to distinguish specific sounds
    The use of sounds to denote environmental events, such as the discovery of food or the approach of a predator
    The production of sounds for the benefit of