If one of your chickens just made a noise like a dog’s bark, you’re not hearing things. You just won’t find a “bark” in the research. I went looking, and not one of the extension sheets or studies I read has it on the list. What they do have is a set of calls with names, and each one goes with something happening in your flock right then. So figure out what the birds were doing when you heard it, and you’ve got a good shot at knowing which call it was.
I rewrote this page from 13 sources (they’re all at the bottom). Two are extension sheets on chicken calls: Jacquie Jacob’s at the University of Kentucky, on the national Poultry Extension site, and one from the University of Maryland. The rest are the alarm-call studies Christopher Evans worked on, P. H. Zimmerman’s research on the gakel call at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, a 2017 review in the journal Animal Cognition, three chapters of the Merck Veterinary Manual, plus a biosecurity sheet from the University of Arkansas. I’ll tell you whose finding is whose as I go.
The short version.
- There’s no bark on the list. The sources name crows, food calls, two kinds of alarm call, the gakel call, the hen’s cackle after an egg and chick distress calls.
- Your flock standing tall and staring? That fits the ground alarm. Look along the ground.
- Your flock crouching or running for cover? That fits the aerial alarm. Look up.
- A hen who won’t quit nagging may be giving the gakel call, the one researchers tie to frustration. Check what she can’t get to.
- A burst of cackling right after an egg is normal.
- A cough, a sneeze or rattly breathing isn’t a call at all. It’s a sign of respiratory disease, and it’s a job for your vet.
No Bark on the List
Jacob starts her list with the rooster, who crows “to assert its dominance over other chickens.” Maryland’s fact sheet (Zoie McMillian and Shawna Weimer wrote it) says roosters crow to show dominance or to tell the flock things are safe. Then it lists the most common chicken calls: the rooster’s crow, food calls, alarm calls, the hen’s cackle after laying, the distress calls of chicks and the hen’s gakel call.
That’s the short list. Lori Marino’s review in Animal Cognition, citing Collias’s studies from 1953 and 1987, puts a chicken’s whole repertoire at “at least 24 distinct vocalizations.” And not one of them, in anything I read, is called a bark.
So when you ask me why a chicken barks, my honest answer is that your bird made one of those calls and it came out sounding like a bark to you. Weirdly, chickens don’t even hear the way we do. Maryland’s sheet says red junglefowl (the wild bird Marino says our chickens descend from) pick up sound from about 200 to 4,100 hertz, and we hear from about 20 to 20,000. Their ears and yours just aren’t tuned to the same range.
It matters who’s calling, too. Jacob writes that hens rarely give alarm calls unless they have a brood of chicks. So if a bird with no chicks is sounding off sharply, odds are you’ve got a rooster. Not sure which you’ve got? Here’s how to tell a Rhode Island Red hen from a rooster.
Ground Alarm
The study everybody leans on here came out in 1993, by Christopher Evans, Linda Evans and Peter Marler. Turns out male chickens give one kind of alarm call for a predator on the ground and a different kind for a predator in the air.
Out in the field, they wrote, the ground call goes up mostly for animals moving on the ground. In the lab they got it with a video of a raccoon, 60 seconds long, played on a monitor. When they played that call back to hens, the hens stood up straight (the paper calls it an erect “vigilant” posture) and scanned around them.
But the ground alarm isn’t even one call. A later abstract by Evans says it comes in several sub-types, and a bird will jump between them in the middle of calling. Going by that abstract, the big differences mark what kind of predator it is. The small ones may carry how close the threat is, or how worked up the bird is.
Here’s what I take from all that. If your flock goes upright and watchful after a call, look along the ground: the fence line, under the coop, the edge of the run, any brush nearby. The study’s stand-in for a ground predator was a raccoon, so that’s the kind of animal I’d be looking for. And if your run keeps letting things in, our page on chicken pen ideas goes through some layouts.
One more thing from the lab. Zimmerman and Koene ran a 1998 study at Wageningen where hens learned to expect food when a light came on, and then the food didn’t come. Their White Leghorn hens answered with lots of alarm calls, which the authors read as anxiety. Nothing in that test was a predator. So in that lab, at least, an alarm call didn’t always mean something was out there.
Aerial Alarm
The other alarm is for the sky. Evans and his colleagues set it off in the lab with a computer animation of a soaring raptor. When hens heard that call played back, they were more likely to run toward cover than after a ground alarm. They crouched. And they were more likely to look up.
Marino’s review puts it plainly: the strongest alarm calls come “when a large, fast-moving hawk appears overhead.” She also notes a male is more likely to give the aerial call when a hen is around.
Karen Bayly and Evans recorded males calling at raptor shapes passing over them, in a 2003 study. The first call in a bout nearly always opened with a loud, broad pulse of sound, then a longer stretch that varied a lot. On the calls after that, the males cut the opening pulse down or dropped it. They point out that the pulse has traits a raptor can easily home in on, and the title of their paper asks whether trimming it is a way to be harder to find.
If I had to bet on which sound you’re hearing as a bark, I’d put my money on that loud opening pulse. That’s my guess, though, not anybody’s finding. Either way, when your flock crouches or bolts under something after a call, look up. Cover is where the hens in the 1993 study headed, so make sure your run has some.
Food Calls
Not every loud call means trouble. Jacob writes that roosters make a food call when they find something good, and the better the food, the more they call. A rooster’s less likely to call with another rooster nearby and more likely with a hen around (especially one he doesn’t know), and the hens usually get first pick.
Maryland’s sheet says roosters pair the call with “tidbitting” to point out food, and Marino describes tidbitting as picking up the morsel and dropping it over and over. She adds that males sometimes make the food call when there’s no food at all. No joke.
Hens have their own version. Jacob says a hen has special calls to lead her chicks to food, and she waits until they’re there before she eats. Maryland adds that a mother hen’s food calls help her chicks learn which foods are safe, and that chick embryos start to hear around 12 days into incubation. Going by the photographer, that’s a Sundheimer hen up there, with two chicks she hatched herself.
Gakel Call
If you learn one call off this page, make it this one. Maryland’s sheet says hens often give a gakel call to show they’re frustrated with their surroundings. It’s a common response when food availability changes, and it often comes along with pacing back and forth or preening that’s out of place.
Most of that research is Zimmerman’s. His thesis at Wageningen found that frustration from blocked feeding, drinking, dust bathing or nesting all came out as the gakel call. In a 2003 study in the journal Animal Welfare, his team gave hungry hens 15 minutes with food they could reach and 15 minutes with the food covered but visible. With the food blocked, the hens paced more and preened more. They gave more gakel calls, too. And a thwarted hen called more when the hen in the next cage was thwarted too than when that neighbor could eat.
The 1998 study had a second strain, Brown Warren hens. When their food didn’t come, they gave more gakel calls and moved around more, where the Leghorns gave alarm calls.
So if one of your hens keeps up a nagging call, look at what she can’t get to:
- The feeder. Is it empty, or is somebody bossier parked in front of it?
- The waterer. Is it dry, or frozen over on a winter morning?
- The dust bath. Has rain turned it to mud, or has it packed down hard?
- The nest box. Is another hen sitting in the one she wants? If you’re short on boxes, our page on bucket nesting boxes covers a cheap way to add some.
Egg Song
Then there’s the racket around laying. Jacob writes that a hen makes a pre-lay call before she goes into a nest. In feral chickens that call draws the roosters, who walk her to a good nest. With domestic roosters, she says, there doesn’t seem to be any such effect. The photographer of the rooster in the box up there called the picture a rooster advertising the laying box, which I kinda love.
After the egg comes the cackle, which Jacob describes as “a repetition of brief sounds followed by a final more extended one.” People used to think the hen was calling the rooster to mate. Jacob says that turned out to be wrong. The cackle actually gets her less attention from males, and the time right after laying is a poor time for fertilization anyway. One idea is that hens cackle to fend off roosters that won’t leave them alone. Maryland’s sheet says pretty much the same thing: the cackle tells males she’s less likely to be receptive.
A string of short notes and one long one, right after an egg shows up, is normal laying behavior and nothing you need to fix. Go get the egg while you’re out there. Here’s how long eggs can sit in the coop.
A Cough Is Different
No joking on this one. A cough, a sneeze or a rattle when a bird breathes isn’t a call. Maryland’s sheet says abnormal breathing sounds like coughing and sneezing, often called rales, are typical signs of respiratory disease in poultry.
The Merck Veterinary Manual lists those sounds under more than one disease:
- Infectious laryngotracheitis: severe trouble breathing, with coughing and rales. Birds gasp, and some cough up bloody mucus.
- Infectious bronchitis: chicks can cough and sneeze and have rales for 10 days to 2 weeks. Merck says it usually sickens 100% of a flock it gets into. In layers, egg production can drop by up to 70%, and getting back to normal can take up to 8 weeks. And Merck says the breathing form needs a lab to confirm it.
- Mycoplasma gallisepticum: anywhere from slight to marked rales, hard breathing, coughing or sneezing, sometimes with a runny nose and frothy eyes.
You can’t tell those apart by ear, and honestly, neither can I. F. Dustan Clark, the extension poultry vet at the University of Arkansas, lists the first signs of illness to watch for: laying drops off or stops, a bird stops eating well, sneezing or gasping, diarrhea, less water drunk, discharge from an eye or a nostril, ruffled feathers and huddling, a bird keeping to itself. If something in your flock is “just not right,” he says to get help right away. Call your vet, your county extension agent, the extension poultry vet, your state veterinarian or the USDA hotline. If a bird dies, ask your state or university diagnostic lab about testing it.
He also says to keep new birds (and your own birds coming home from a show) away from your flock for at least 30 days, and at least 100 feet off if you can. His reason: a new bird can be carrying a disease and not show it yet. Merck adds that chickens can shed the bronchitis virus on and off for up to 20 weeks after they’re infected.
Sources
- Jacquie Jacob, University of Kentucky, on the Poultry Extension site: Vocalization of Chickens in Small and Backyard Poultry Flocks.
- University of Maryland Extension, fact sheet FS-1177 on chicken vocalizations and welfare (Zoie McMillian and Shawna Weimer, September 2021, PDF).
- Evans, Evans and Marler: On the Meaning of Alarm Calls (Animal Behaviour, 1993).
- Christopher Evans: Variation in the Structure of a Referential Signal (conference abstract, 2006).
- Bayly and Evans: Dynamic Changes in Alarm Call Structure (Behaviour, 2003).
- Lori Marino: Thinking Chickens, a review of the research on the domestic chicken (Animal Cognition, 2017).
- Zimmerman, Lundberg, Keeling and Koene: The Effect of an Audience on the Gakel-Call in the Laying Hen (Animal Welfare, 2003).
- P. H. Zimmerman: Say What? Vocalisation as an Indicator of Welfare in the Domestic Laying Hen (thesis, Wageningen University, 1999).
- Zimmerman and Koene: The Effect of Frustrative Non-Reward on Vocalisations in the Laying Hen (Behavioural Processes, 1998).
- Merck Veterinary Manual: Infectious Laryngotracheitis (Maricarmen Garcia, reviewed September 2024).
- Merck Veterinary Manual: Infectious Bronchitis in Chickens (Brian Jordan, reviewed August 2024).
- Merck Veterinary Manual: Mycoplasma Gallisepticum Infection in Poultry (Mohamed El-Gazzar, reviewed September 2025).
- F. Dustan Clark, University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service: Poultry Biosecurity Practices (PDF).
Sources checked October 26, 2026. The guess about which call sounds like a bark is mine, and I’ve marked it as one. We aren’t vets. If one of your birds is coughing or just looks off to you, call a vet who sees poultry.
Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe
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