We have four chickens. And we have been observing their cuisine and eating habits. Besides their ever present chicken crumble and the occasional sprinkling of scratch in the chickenyard or coop, our chickens supplement their diets from a variety of sources: worms, grasshoppers and, yes, crickets.

One of our chickens is an excellent wormer. She scratches away dirt, and faster than you can follow it, she nabs that worm and swallows it down. She pulls one worm after another from the ground in this way. Where I only see the soil sliding and settling after a good scratch, she sees a worm; and with a sure aim of her beak, she pokes and gulps, and that’s the end of that worm. My daughters are a bit scandalized at the food the chickens relish; after witnessing the demise of a particularly large and luscious bug or worm, they exclaim, “Eeeeeewww! remind me not to eat her eggs tomorrow!”

Another of our chickens is great at catching, killing and devouring grasshoppers. I hate grasshoppers, so when we find one, we point “Frodo” toward it and watch her take care of it – chicken style. It really is facinating to watch. First the hen grabs the grasshopper in her beak; she usually holds him just behind the head. Then with sharp and forceful downward thrusts, the chicken bashes the head of that grasshopper to smithereens. That immobilizes him and the chicken is able to devour him whole. It is amazing to see the size of the grasshoppers they can eat in this fashion.

Concerning chickens and crickets, this is what happens at our house. Right outside our kitchen door we have a few steps down to the driveway. These stairs tend to be a collecting spot for…stuff: shoes, socks, cleaning supplies, dirty towels. These stairs are low priority on my list of things to do, so we tend to have things accumulate there and remain there for…a while. While picking up some towels that had graced the back steps for several days, we discovered many crickets had taken refuge underneath: twenty, thirty or forty crickets! An attack chicken was dispatched immediately, the crickets scattered and dispersed with a few unfortunate crickets providing a nutritious snack for the chicken. So now the towels on the back steps are laid out by design; it is a type of supplemental feeding plan for our chickens. There are two downsides to this; one, there is always the possibility of tripping down the stairs on the towels; and two, only one of our four chickens has shown any proficiency in catching crickets.