Chicken Boy: My Life With Hens

Product Information

But the quiet fulfilment of keeping hens became his sanctuary, a tonic for mental and physical health, a connection with his family and the natural world. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. His writing and photography are regularly featured in the Daily Telegraph , and have appeared in The Times , Country Life and Country Living , among other magazines and newspapers; he has also featured in BBC Two's Gardeners' World . With delightful anecdotes, practical insights, and a dash of humour, this book celebrates the simple pleasures of connecting with nature and the enchantment that comes from sharing your life with these feathered friends. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

It also made me realise that I am not in a position to get chickens and that to get them would be entirely for my own pleasure and that is not the point.

I have found my tribe' Most of us want a dog, or a cat, or a pony when we are young - for Arthur Parkinson, it was always hens.

Illustrated with Arthur’s own characterful watercolours and photographs of his ‘girls’, and laden with practical hen-keeping tips, gardening advice and introductions to common, rare and pure breeds, Chicken Boy is a one-of-a-kind memoir of a life in nature.

But the quiet fulfilment of keeping hens became his sanctuary, a tonic for mental and physical health, and in this memoir he details his connection with hens, his family and the natural world. Came away with a much deeper understanding of my hens, what they need and how I can improve their lives for the better. Additional note that this is the most beautiful and satisfying hardback book I now own, the format and texture and every page so well thought through n produced.

As a life-long aviculturist, I laud this book for everything it offers, including the exercise of conscience and strategic engagement with the keeping of poultry. The whole point of this book is to build a generous, nurturing relationship with the natural world and to rebalance things in favour of a world of we have so long taken from and not given back to.

Although it might seem like a book on hen keeping would appeal to only a niche audience, I feel confident that most readers would thoroughly enjoy it.

Parkinson is charming and knowledgeable, passionate about chickens and the way of life he has chosen and he is very generous in the way he shares it with the reader.

I have neither inclination nor conducive circumstances to raise chickens anytime soon (although I generally enjoy reading about agrarian life and have always been fond of chickens), but Chicken Boy ranks among my favorite reads in recent memory. It is impossible to easily classify the book in terms of genre: part reflection on the joys of keeping hens, part memoir of the substantial role that chickens have played in Parkinson’s life, part guide to hen keeping, part encyclopedia of the beautiful menagerie of chicken breeds. Arthur Parkinson is a young British gardening expert who, judging by his six-figure Instagram follower number (which I now count myself amongst), is apparently pretty well known, although he was unfamiliar to me before I encountered Chicken Boy. Kudos to the publisher for creating a book that feels special and high quality, with a gorgeous cover design and color scheme that complement Parkinson’s top notch chicken illustrations and photographs, which are included on at least every other page and add so much to the experience of the book.