Keep Chickens!: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs and Other Small Spaces (6 page)
Read Keep Chickens!: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs and Other Small Spaces Online
Authors: Barbara Kilarski
Tags: #chickens, #health, #care, #poultry, #raising, #city, #urban, #housing, #keeping, #farming, #eggs, #chicks, #chicken, #hen, #rooster
Chickens in Motion
The Girls come tumbling out of their coop and onto the lawn. Zsa Zsa suddenly turns around, then dashes forward. She stops on a dime and, without any encouragement from the other Girls, shoots a couple of feet straight up into the air. Now Lucy and Whoopee get revved up, probably as a result of Zsa Zsa’s floor show. Soon three crazy chickens are running around and jumping up into the air for no apparent reason. Suddenly, perhaps embarrassed by their awkward and poorly choreographed modern dance outburst, the Girls try to trick me into thinking I’ve just hallucinated a flock of bouncing chickens. They freeze in their chicken tracks, glance nonchalantly from side to side, and then bend down to nibble on blades of grass, as if nothing happened. I watch them for some time, but the Girls continue to cluck and munch quietly without any further jumping for apparent chicken joy.
The Henhouse Sideshow
The Girls gather under a butterfly bush and quietly, contentedly peruse for insects in the soil. All is quiet. Then a shrill, panicked scream pierces the air. I look up to see Zsa Zsa running off with a beetle kicking several pairs of legs wildly in her beak. The other Girls are in hot pursuit and are also screaming. Chicken screams sound like an elongated, screeching “cheeeeeeP, cheeeeeeP” done over and over again until it resembles a single, continuous ear-piercing shriek. Suddenly, Zsa Zsa’s concentration falters in the cacophony, and Lucy deftly moves in. With a single, undercutting motion Lucy snags the beetle from Zsa Zsa’s beak with her own. Lucy is now running across the lawn, screaming. Whoopee jumps out of the bushes into Lucy’s meandering path, the beetle drops, and Zsa Zsa comes out of the backfield, picks it up, and runs off into the direct path of Whoopee. This went on for a while until the beetle escaped (not likely) or was eaten (snap, crackle, crunch!).
Three Heads Are Better Than One
Several friends and I are seated around a picnic table on the lawn. The Girls are pecking the grass near our feet. Zsa Zsa jumps up onto the picnic bench next to one of my friends. Lucy jumps up next to me. Then Zsa Zsa jumps up onto the table. Lucy follows. The two Girls are strutting atop the table like animated centerpieces. They cajole for crackers. They beg for cheese puffs. They whine for beer. They are shameless, as chickens have no idea what shame is. My friends comply with my request never to feed chickens at the table. Zsa Zsa gets impatient and jumps up on my shoulder. Lucy mimics Zsa Zsa and jumps up onto my other shoulder. Everyone is laughing. Everyone but me. I’m held motionless under 15 pounds of shoulder-mounted urban chickens.
The Girls get more than their share of visitors. Company loves the Girls, and the Girls love all the company. Since chickens joined our family, friends and neighbors have been regularly inviting themselves over to visit. They say they are coming to see me, but I know better. After a few perfunctory greetings and hospitable words, the conversation always turns to the hens. “So . . . how are the Girls?” Pretty soon, everybody is marching outside to the coop to visit them.
Our community coop culture became evident even as the first pine studs went up to frame the coop. Friends and family took an immediate interest in the project. My neighbors’ children came over, asked questions about chickens, and even participated in building the coop. Everybody was always asking, “Is the coop done?” and “Have you got the chickens yet?” It was chicken talk, all the time. My Mom and Dad, themselves former farm folks, gave me loads of advice and then surprised me with pop quizzes on my chicken IQ. These sweet, simple-minded birds were the hot topic in all conversations with everyone we knew. My pet flock had inadvertently become a family and community project.
You may have a Ping-Pong table, a satellite television, or an RV. No matter how many extracurricular amusements you have, once you add a pet flock of chickens to your household, you’ll never have another boring day at home.
Henry David Thoreau, one of the nineteenth century’s great American writers, original thinkers, and vanguard nature buffs, believed in self-reliance and simplicity. Throughout
Walden,
one of his most famous works, Thoreau links the striving to simplify life with actively participating in the act of feeding oneself. By simplifying the means and ends of sustenance and, therefore, self-reliance, Thoreau believed, we would be closer to nature, to Earth, and eventually to ourselves.
Quality of life meant everything to Thoreau. According to him, such quality could be achieved by trimming away the extraneous, complex, and distracting elements of daily life. He emphasized simplicity and respect for the natural world and its animal inhabitants. In his literature, he seemed in awe of animals, even a common sparrow: “I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment . . . and I felt I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.”
Poultry Tribune,
circa 1940.
If Thoreau was so moved by a sparrow, imagine how he would have felt about chickens! Of course, chickens don’t “alight” upon anything, especially on one’s shoulder, but they are one of the natural world’s greatest little creatures. What domesticated animal can feed large amounts of people while not encroaching on large tracts of land in the process? What so-called food animal has such varied beauty throughout its breeds? What animal can participate in and enhance our daily routine while requiring so little in return? The chicken.
I understood
Walden
intellectually, but it wasn’t until I started keeping chickens that I really understood what Thoreau was writing about. What happens when I run out of eggs? Do I get dressed, grab my purse and car keys, gun the cold car engine with a gush of fossil fuel, and rush down residential streets to the Super Mart for a box of uniform, fragile white eggs laid who knows how long ago? I don’t think so! Still in my pajamas, I open the back door, walk the short distance to my backyard henhouse, and gather the fresh eggs that are waiting for me, thanks to my small flock of hens. This is a lot simpler than what I used to do, and much more enjoyable.
The reemergence of chickens in America’s backyards is a testament to the longevity of Thoreau’s values. In an age when we’re more and more estranged from nature and simplicity, I’m confident Thoreau would approve of chickens in the city.
I had initially approached my egg-laying garden chickens as a hobby — a fun and practical hobby. Now, I can’t imagine life without the Girls clucking and scratching around in the yard. In a simple and affirming way, my chickens are daily reminders of the good things in my life.
Chicken Basics
Before designing your coop and deciding what kinds of hens to get for your pet urban flock, you will need to know some basic “chicken speak.” If you are anything like me — a suburb-raised, city-loving person — then your general knowledge of chickens is low. Woefully low. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. After all, over the past 50 years, chickens have receded from common sight in one’s neighborhood, being relegated to the margins of rural life and rare enclaves of animal husbandry. With them went rudimentary chicken facts.
When people find out I have a small flock of chickens, they always ask the same question: “Don’t you need to keep a rooster in order to get eggs?” Though it’s tempting to say something sassy in response, I refrain, because once there was a time when I didn’t know the answer (although I was very young at that time). The answer is no. The only thing you need for eggs is a hen. A rooster is necessary only if you want those eggs to be fertile, producing baby chicks. Besides, city law usually prohibits the keeping of roosters in residential flocks of the cities and suburbs.
What about those red, serrated “hats” on a chicken’s head — what are those called? Do chickens have shins? Is there really such a thing as pecking order? Before answering these and other frequently asked questions, I will address the oldest and most frequent chicken question of all time.
Hens don’t need a rooster to lay eggs. A rooster fertilizes eggs; he’s necessary for chicks, but not for eggs.
Modern chickens descended from South Asian wild jungle fowl about 8,000 years ago.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? While the answer to this question is incessantly debated, the origins of the domestic chicken are more definite, though not entirely precise. Scientists generally agree that today’s domestic chicken
(Gallus domesticus)
had its origins in Southeast Asia between six thousand and eight thousand years ago. At that time in what today would be the countries of Thailand and Vietnam, four types of wild jungle fowl
(Gallus gallus)
existed. Some scientists (including, in his day, Charles Darwin) believe that the chicken descended solely from the Red Jungle Fowl. Other members of the scientific community posit that more than one of the four wild jungle fowl varieties may have contributed to modern chicken DNA.
Most scientists and chicken researchers agree that chickens were domesticated in India sometime between 4000 and 3000 b.c. These chickens weren’t “chicken” but fearsome flocks of fowl raised by royalty for cockfighting. Because of their aggressive, single-minded focus on combat in the ring, roosters became a symbol of war and courage. Throughout ancient history, battle garments and clan insignia bore the image of a rooster with his head held high and chest puffed out, staring into the distance, unblinkingly awaiting whatever combat should come his way.
Chickens begin to appear in historical and literary references in China, Egypt, and Babylon between 1500 and 600 b.c. Even the Greek playwright Aristophanes referred to chickens in his dramatic works. While Alexander the Great is known for bringing chickens to Europe, the birds may in fact have arrived earlier, accompanying far-traveling trade merchants and wandering soldiers as their primary source of protein on the roads of battle and commerce. It is at this time that chickens forged their role as the first real “to go” meal in recorded history.
The ancient, vanguard chickens gradually evolved into contemporary classes of chickens. From Europe, chickens most likely emigrated to the Americas care of Christopher Columbus in the North and the Spaniards in the South. Once here, chickens became an important source of meat for the inhabitants of and immigrants to the New World.
Poultry popularity came to a head in what is sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age of Pure Breed Poultry.” During the mid- to late 1800s, dozens of poultry clubs sprang up in England and the United States. These clubs guided and influenced the creation of then-new breeds of chickens that remain popular today.
Now that you have some hen history under your hat, it’s time to enhance your cosmopolitan vocabulary with a few choice words about the bird.
Chick.
A baby chicken.
Chicken.
A type of domesticated fowl raised and kept for meat, eggs, and ornamentation.