Keep Chickens!: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs and Other Small Spaces (3 page)

So there it is, the tale of my transformation from city chick to urban chicken keeper. Each day my little flock of hens helps me find the taste of the good, simple life. And I feel a sense of pride and security in being able to feed my family and me from my urban garden, both vegetables
and
protein, thanks to my chickens.

Until about 50 years ago, it was common to keep a few chickens on one’s property, however modest the parcel. Cities had not yet spilled over onto adjacent farmlands and rural residences. Folks grew a good portion of their own food. Chickens were an integral part of the family food chain. Small flocks of chickens coexisted with “kitchen gardens,” compact plots of earth growing enough greens and vegetables for a family. Three, four, perhaps a dozen hens provided the household with eggs and meat. Fresh food was available right outside the back door.

In those days, chickens were part of everyday life. With the rooster’s crow at dawn, hens in the henhouse would stir from sleep, as would the humans in the peoplehouse. During the morning, somebody would let the hens out into the yard and collect any “early bird” eggs. The chickens roamed around all day, scratching for bugs and grit and laying eggs in secretive nooks of the yard. In the late afternoon, someone would toss a few handfuls of grain into the coop to lure back the free-ranging chickens, and the kids were sent out to search for the eggs.

Two to four hens will provide plenty of eggs and amusement for a small household.

The color of a hen’s ear lobe roughly corresponds to the color of her eggs.

Once your urban flock is established, daily chicken care is minimal.

Life got busier over the next several decades. Personal time and space, and especially backyard size for single-family homes, decreased.
Progress
became the defining buzzword and underlying foundation of a “good and successful” life. To pursue Progress, whether by choice or at the whim of destiny, people moved away from their spacious rural homes and into compact and convenient urban and suburban communities. With their migration, one of life’s most prized possessions — personal self-sufficiency — was lost. As a consequence of shrinking yard space, garden flocks or family flocks of chickens disappeared from household yards and were culturally banished to the margins of farm life. At the same time that chickens flew the household coop, chicken ranching was growing into an agribusiness. In place of family hens roosting on a picket fences or scratching beneath the kitchen window, gigantic chicken farms and egg-production “factories” sprawled across the landscape. With Progress nipping at the heels of the mid-twentieth century, chickens became more than family food — chickens were big money for big new chicken businesses. Times had changed for chickens and for Americans. In France, chickens have historically been a symbol of good fortune and prosperity. In the United States, chickens have become a nostalgic icon of a way of life now gone by.

The past two or three generations of Americans — the Baby Boomers — never considered keeping a small flock of chickens as pets or private egg suppliers. Chickens were considered dirty, noisy, stupid, and needing more care than busy city folks in pursuit of Progress could offer. Progress, together with then-adolescent Convenience, convinced us that easy-to-obtain, commercially produced eggs were just as good as home-grown fresh eggs.

When I was growing up in the early 1960s, my parents and grandparents spoke fondly about the chickens they had while they were growing up. Mom always smiled when she recalled her chicken chores: feeding the hens and finding the eggs. The way Mom told it, having chickens sounded like a fun pastime, not a burden. After all, what kid doesn’t like animals? Especially animals that created an egg treasure hunt every day. But Mom, Dad, and Grandma all grew up so long ago and so far away on small farms or in homes with oversized yards. I was a kid living in a crowded bedroom suburb of Los Angeles, plotted for maximum occupancy and minimum greenery and animal life. Nobody had to grow anything. Fluorescent-flickering supermarkets lined the wide, asphalt boulevards. Prepackaged produce, eggs, and meat were readily available, sometimes 24 hours a day. Nobody I knew had chickens. Chickens were synonymous with “country life,” which was out there, somewhere, far away from where I lived in the infinite suburbs.

Poultry Tribune,
circa 1940.

Consequently, our Progress-driven cul-ture evolved to a chicken-deprived culture. Generations of Americans became com-pletely removed from chickens and common chicken facts. Today most people don’t even know that hens lay eggs with or without a rooster on the premises, and that brooding is not just something you do when you lose your cell phone. Folks have forgotten, or no longer believed, that chickens could be kept in a modest yard to provide one’s family with fresh eggs. What was once a simple part of life had taken on a complicated reputation. After all, don’t chickens need a lot of space and care? Don’t they make a really big mess? Don’t they make a lot of noise?

The answer to all of the above is
no
. Chickens and the typical city or suburban garden complement each other if set up and maintained the right way. A few chickens are easy to care for and provide enthusiastic pest control and loads of free fertilizer. They also are guaranteed to provide you and your family with hours of relatively free entertainment. Depending, that is, on how you define “entertainment” — my family is easily amused.

Chickens don’t need a lot of space for their home and hangout. Three standard laying hens need a henhouse the size of a large doghouse. They also need an enclosed outdoor coop (pen), at least four times the square footage of the henhouse, in which to stretch their legs. As for the time spent actually caring for chickens, it takes about 10 minutes each day to feed and water the hens and collect their eggs. Once you realize how little time is needed from your busy, overscheduled, Progress-driven day to keep chickens, you’ll make the necessary time. Caring for your hens will subtly evolve into a pleasurable routine and brief respite from a hectic day.

That is exactly what is happening in towns, suburbs, and cities across America. For example, where I live in Portland, hens and henhouses are hatching all over in the modest yards of city homes. These urban chickens and their coops are most noticeable in my neighborhood, a cosmopolitan community with a hip, eclectic blend of businesses — cafés, beauty and bath shops, bead stores, bird suppliers, chiropractors, and art galleries, just for starters.

In the middle of this dense, busy neighborhood, there’s a whole lot of clucking going on. Quiet streets tapering away from the main arteries carry the sound of a hen’s happy cackles after laying an egg. A quiet flock of bantams (miniature breeds of chickens) scours a grassy parking strip for beetles and worms. Behind flowering pink dogwoods, a compact coop built on stilts has plump hens with vivid black and red plumage scratching underneath.

Portland residents and all other city, town, and country animal lovers with farm fresh tastes are bringing small flocks of chickens back into the garden. And for good reason, too. No other farm animal is as adaptable to small-space living as is the chicken. Miniature pigs are small in name only and in reality are quite heavy on the hoof. Cows are too large, goats are too destructive, and horses need special and spacious accommodations and recreation. But chickens can join a household with no more difficulty than a cockatiel, rabbit, or reptile. Chickens don’t get too big, don’t need specialized care, and don’t need to be taken out for a walk. How about that? Chickens are easy, chickens are fun, chickens are in.

Lately, no matter where I go, everyone is talking chicken. On the bus, riders discuss the different shades of egg colors laid by their hens. In the grocery store, a little girl runs up to her mother with a head of lettuce, pleading, “Can we get this for the chickens, Mom?” Local newspapers carry feature articles about chickens, their coops, their owners. Slowly, surely, chickens are migrating in small flocks back into hearts and gardens all across North America.

Surprisingly, most large cities in all 50 states of the United States permit residents to keep two, three, or more hens. (For a partial list of many big cities that allow residents to keep chickens, see the appendix.) Most municipal codes permit chickens in residential areas, subject to one or more codified stipulations (aka “the Law”). For example, the chicken house may be required to be a minimum distance from neighbors’ residences. Nuisance codes prohibit the indefinite clucking of happy hens, and health regulations specify coop sanitation standards, such as cleaning the coop once or twice a week, and more often in summer. Most city codes aren’t that restrictive. In fact, city codes that pertain to keeping chickens are quite reasonable. If you don’t keep too many chickens, you can raise chickens in the city.

Beyond the realm of keeping of a few chickens for pets or eggs exists the world of
fancy poultry
. No, we’re not talking about chickens in tuxedos and slinky gowns attending a black-tie charity event. Think
chicken show
— a grand, competitive get-together for folks who have elevated their chicken ownership from mere amusement and incidental practicality to a deep and abiding appreciation for breeding diverse, interesting, and beautiful chickens. These “professional” chicken lovers are known as
chicken fanciers
or
poultry fanciers
. They raise their purebred birds according to the American Poultry Association’s
American Standard of Perfection
, the undisputed blueprint for the standard characteristics of each officially recognized breed. Each year, several hundred poultry shows are held in the United States and abroad where chickens and their owners strut their stuff.

After raising two or three chicks to adult hens, smiling at their antics, and collecting their eggs, you might become really excited about chickens. You may even want to raise poultry for show or for meat. My advice: Don’t do it! Raising chickens to show or to butcher for the meat is an entirely different experience from keeping a few hens to provide enough laughs and eggs year-round for you and your family. Raising chickens for meat or show involves a significantly greater amount of time, expense, and space than keeping a small flock of pet chickens. There’s also the rooster problem. The most economical way of raising chickens is to keep a rooster for fertilizing your hens’ eggs. Because nearly all cities and towns have laws prohibiting keeping roosters within their limits, you most likely cannot have a rooster, and therefore no baby chicks. But that’s okay — you will have plenty of fresh eggs to enjoy and share with family, friends, and neighbors.

However, if you are absolutely sure that you need more chickens, gratify your need, but not at your neighbors’ expense. A few hens are charming; more than a dozen can get quite noisy, even without a rooster crowing all day. To keep you, your neighbors, and your chickens happy, keep larger flocks of chickens on oversized lots or on acreage as far away from neighbors’ windows as you can. Never keep more chickens in your residential yard than is permitted by law. Folks who flout the law and the common sense restrictions about keeping large numbers of fowl on too small a parcel of property create a headache for neighbors and city employees and give city chickens a bad name.