Poultry
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50 free Poultry trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Poultry is some of the most familiar livestock on earth and some of the least understood. The birds people raise for meat and eggs have their own vocabulary, their own anatomy and a history that runs from wild forest birds to the Thanksgiving table. Almost everyone eats them, yet few of us could name the parts of the bird we carve. This quiz covers the whole farmyard: chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese, along with the game birds that share the butcher's counter. Expect questions on breeds and where they came from, the proper names for males, females and young, how a bird digests its food, what goes on inside an egg, and the classic dishes that made certain birds famous. A few questions deal with food safety and farming, and a few with the legends, sayings and oddities that poultry has given the language. It suits pub quiz teams, agriculture and 4-H classes, backyard keepers, and anyone planning a round for a poultry trivia day or a Thanksgiving gathering. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing more than your score.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Despite the Kentucky in its name, the first KFC franchise was opened by restaurateur Pete Harman in which US state?
Utah
Utah got Kentucky Fried Chicken first, when Harland Sanders licensed his recipe to a friend in South Salt Lake. That friend later introduced the cardboard bucket.
Q 02Which Founding Father wrote to his daughter that the turkey was a more respectable bird than the bald eagle?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was criticising the eagle on the crest of the Society of the Cincinnati, and he never proposed the turkey as a national symbol. That part of the story is a myth.
Q 03Domestic turkeys descend from birds first tamed in which country, before the Spanish took them to Europe?
Mexico
Mexico is where ancient Mesoamericans first domesticated the bird, prizing its feathers for decoration as well as its meat and eggs.
Q 04Which amino acid is popularly, though wrongly, blamed for the drowsiness that follows a big Thanksgiving turkey dinner?
Tryptophan
Tryptophan is no more plentiful in turkey than in other poultry. The sleepiness is more likely caused by a heavy meal rich in carbohydrates.
Q 05Mike the Headless Chicken, a Colorado rooster beheaded in 1945, survived for roughly how long afterwards?
18 months
18 months went by before Mike died, because the axe had left most of his brain stem intact. His owner fed him milk and water through an eyedropper and toured him in sideshows.
Q 06According to legend, the honking of sacred geese saved which ancient city from a night attack by Gauls?
Rome
Rome was spared because geese sacred to the goddess Juno cackled as the attackers climbed the Capitoline Hill, waking the defenders when the guards and dogs had heard nothing.
Q 07Deep-fried chicken wings tossed in hot sauce take their name from which New York city, home of the Anchor Bar?
Buffalo
Buffalo credits Teressa Bellissimo with first serving the wings at her family's bar in 1964, and the city declared an official Chicken Wing Day in 1977.
Q 08Which flightless bird, farmed for meat, leather and feathers, lays the largest egg of any living bird?
Ostrich
Ostrich eggs weigh about 1.4 kg, over twenty times as much as a hen's egg. Measured against the size of the mother, though, they are the smallest eggs of any bird.
Q 09The furcula, a forked bone formed from a bird's fused collarbones, is better known at the dinner table by what name?
Wishbone
Wishbone pulling for luck grew out of a much older habit of telling fortunes with the forked bone of a goose, a custom recorded since the late Middle Ages.
Q 10Which everyday phrase for a social hierarchy was coined by a Norwegian zoologist who watched hens rank themselves?
Pecking order
Pecking order began as the German word Hackordnung in Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe's 1921 study of hens, and it only entered English in 1927.
Q 11What is the proper name for an adult male duck, a word shared with a famous Elizabethan sea captain?
Drake
Drake plumage is often showy in northern species, but the males moult it in summer and take on a drab, female-like coat known as eclipse plumage.
Q 12Which word for a male goose also appears in an informal expression meaning to take a look at something?
Gander
Gander shares an ancient Germanic root with the word goose itself, and when the two are paired, goose means the female alone.
Q 13What is the name for a rooster castrated to improve its meat, a practice recorded as early as 162 BC?
Capon
Capon rearing took off in Rome after a law of 162 BC banned the fattening of hens to save grain. Farmers castrated roosters instead, which doubled the birds' size.
Q 21Which American chicken breed, developed in New England in the 1800s, is the official state bird of its namesake state?
Rhode Island Red
Rhode Island Red hens were bred to supply both meat and eggs, and the state marked the breed's centenary in 1954 by raising a monument to it at a farm in Little Compton.
Q 22Which prolific layer of white eggs takes its English name from the Tuscan port of Livorno?
Leghorn
Leghorn is the old English name for Livorno, the port that shipped the first birds to North America. A good hen lays about 280 eggs a year.
Q 23Which word for a miniature chicken or duck comes from the name of a seaport in western Java?
Bantam
Q 14Baby chickens are chicks and baby geese are goslings, but what is a newly hatched turkey called?
Poult
Poult is the usual word, though turkeyling is also heard. Adult males have regional names too: toms in North America, stags in Britain and Ireland.
Q 15Which term describes a female chicken less than a year old, not yet counted as a fully grown hen?
Pullet
Pullet has a stricter meaning in the poultry industry, where it describes a sexually immature bird under 22 weeks of age.
Q 16Because birds have no teeth, which muscular organ grinds a chicken's food with the help of swallowed grit?
Gizzard
Gizzard walls are thick muscle, and the organ can pass food back and forth with the true stomach until the swallowed stones have ground it fine.
Q 17What is the name of the fleshy red crest on top of a chicken's head, usually larger on roosters?
Comb
Comb tissue is edible, and Italian cooks simmer it with chicken livers and unlaid eggs in a traditional sauce called cibreo.
Q 18What is the fleshy flap that dangles over a male turkey's beak, which hens prefer to be long?
Snood
Snood length carries weight with other males as well: in face-offs, a male turkey defers to a rival whose flap is longer than his own.
Q 19Which wild bird of Southeast Asia is the main ancestor of the domestic chicken?
Red junglefowl
Red junglefowl can still fly, while their farmyard descendants have grown too heavy to stay airborne for more than a short distance.
Q 20On restaurant menus, squab is the meat of which young bird, usually killed before it is four weeks old?
Pigeon
Pigeon chicks must be fed by both parents, unlike other poultry, so squab farmers keep bonded breeding pairs that can each raise about 15 young a year.
Bantam was where European sailors restocked with live fowl for long voyages, and the small local chickens they bought gave their name to every miniature variety.
Q 24Which chicken breed has fluffy plumage that feels like fur, along with black skin and five toes on each foot?
Silkie
Silkie hens are so keen to sit on a nest that keepers use them to hatch the eggs of other breeds. Marco Polo described a furry chicken on his travels in Asia.
Q 25Which chicken breed from Chile, sometimes tailless and ear-tufted, is famous for laying blue-shelled eggs?
Araucana
Araucana hens are among very few that lay blue eggs, and the American Easter egger hybrids that lay blue or green ones descend from them.
Q 26Which duck had already been domesticated by Native Americans when Columbus arrived, despite carrying an Old World name?
Muscovy
Muscovy ducks are native from Texas south to Argentina, and the name may come from their musky smell, since the species did not come from Russia.
Q 27Which wild duck, whose males have glossy green heads, is the ancestor of nearly all domestic duck breeds?
Mallard
Mallard ducks breed so freely with their farmyard descendants that escaped domestic birds are now diluting the wild gene pool.
Q 28Which wild goose, already kept as a farm bird in ancient Egypt, is the ancestor of most European farmyard goose breeds?
Greylag
Greylag geese appear as farmyard birds in Egyptian paintings from about 1360 BC, while the domestic geese of eastern Asia descend from a different species, the swan goose.
Q 29Which white meat duck was founded in America on just four birds that survived an 1873 sea voyage?
Pekin
Pekin ducks displaced the dark-feathered Cayuga as the favourite meat bird because any white fluff left on a plucked carcass is much harder to see.
Q 30Which duck breed, noted for its egg production, stands erect like a penguin and does not waddle?
Indian Runner
Indian Runner ducks cannot fly and get about by running, and despite the name they were bred on Lombok, Java and Bali, far from India.