Funky Chicken Coop Tour - Austin, Texas - March 30, 2013

Things you can learn with a chicken on your lap!

Chickens are hot animals with no sweat glands. They generate heat easily, and even in the winter, a chicken needs to cool down. They generate heat from eating, ranging, sunning, pooping, breathing, or just resting with their feathers down. They warm up by huddling together on the roost and produce enough heat to warm the inside of the coop. Feed them well during the day, and they will produce the heat their body needs at night.

Chickens don't sweat. They cool themselves by finding shade, cool water, lowering activity and food consumption, fluffing out their feathers, and panting. So why would a chicken be panting in the winter, or roosting with its mouth open? To cool itself! At the upper range of their normal temperature, 104-107F, they are just a handful of degrees away from life threatening temperatures. They are always mindful of regulating their own body heat, even in temperatures that are cold to us sweat-glanded creatures.

So have you ever REALLy watched a chicken panting? Its just one of those amazing designs of thermodynamics in animal form. When the chicken pants, or breathes with its beak open, it is expelling moist hot air. How does that cool a chicken? Evaporation causes cooling, with the heat transferred to the air, and the water vapor turned to a gas. The chicken cools as the faster moving heated water particles leave the body, and the cooler condensed drops reabsorbed.

Get close enough so you can see the inside of the mouth while its panting. I observed it first with my bantam roo sitting on my chest while I reclined. The beak is V-shaped. If you would project mist towards the narrow part of the V, as happens with exhaling, a certain amount of the moisture leaves the mouth and evaporates, causing cooling, and a certain amount condenses at the V. The moisture collects there, cooling with each exhale, on the roof of its mouth. Until if forms a bead of moisture and the chicken closes its mouth and swallows the cooler drop. And then opens its mouth and starts panting again.

Just amazing, the things you can learn with a chicken on your lap!

-BluebonnetEggs