Are you an urban chicken expert?

I discovered, through the mundane-yet-critical-task of looking at the web stats for this blog that I've been outed as an expert on Urban Chickens over on "The Blogger's Secret" a blog written by Edward Vielmetti (you may know him from another blog: Vacuum).

Of course, I'm honored to be on the short list of "here's how to become an expert in a niche topic" but I also want it on the record that I'm nowhere near the smartest one around on the subject of raising chickens.

Just take a look at the blog roll and the comments to see where the great advice really comes from.

I've just been the lucky one to blog what I've learned from you all.

Thanks, everyone, for making UrbanChickens.net such a great resource!

Urban Chickens written up in Newsweek

Don't miss this week's Newsweek.com's article "The Craze for Urban Chicken Farming" which I think does a nice job covering the urban chicken territory. The author of the article, Jessica Bennett, does a great job capturing all the reasons we, as a group, are into urban chicken farming, and she calls out the usual suspects where we gather as a community online:

Chicken farmers are finding each other on sites like TheCityChicken.com, UrbanChickens.org and MadCityChickens.com. BackyardChickens.com logs some 6 million page views each month and has some 18,000 members in its forum, where community members share colorful stories (giving a chicken CPR), photos (from a California chicken show), even look to each other for comfort. "I am worried that non-BYC people won't understand why a 34-year-old woman would cry over a $7 chicken," writes a Stockton, N.J., woman, whose chicken was killed by a hawk.

And a BIG congratulations to KT Labadie over at UrbanChickens.org (what a great name!) for her paragraph in the story:

Over at UrbanChickens.org, which launched this year, founder K. T. LaBadie, a master's student in community planning, provides updates on city ordinances, info about local chicken-farming classes and coop tours and has been contacted by activists hoping to overturn chicken bans around the nation. In Albuquerque, where she lives with her husband and four chickens—Gloria, Switters, Buffy and Omelet—residents can keep 15 chickens and one rooster, subject to noise ordinances, as well as slaughter the chickens for food. In July, LaBadie wrote in detail of her first killing: she and her husband hung the bird by its legs, slit its throat, plucked its feathers and put it on ice. Then they slow-cooked it for 20 hours. "It's not pretty, it's kinda messy, and it's a little smelly," she writes. "But it's quite real."

I remember when I first met K.T. last year when she reached out to me doing research on urban chickens as part of her studies. I'm so amazed at what she's pulled together over on her .org site to help the entire urban chickens movement.

Here's hoping there are many more urban chicken farmers about to join us!

chicken peacekeepers captured on video

They're breaking up a fight between bunnies. All we need do is outfit the chooks with little blue helmets (they've already got the attitude)!



BTW, my filming session with Carol went wonderfully smooth, at least in my eyes. She promises a quicktime of the results once her editing is complete. Rest assured, I'll share her craft here on the blog.

(Are you interested in helping her out? Drop her an email at csmac22@gmail.com and tell her UrbanChickens.net sent you!)

Calling all East Bay urban chicken farmers

If you live in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area here in California, please consider saying yes to this filming request from Carol:

I'm working on a short piece for a project on people who keep chickens for food or as pets here in the Bay Area, especially in more urbanized areas.

So I'm looking for folks willing to let me film them talking about their experiences keeping chickens. And I'd really love to get some footage of someone sitting down to an egg breakfast, fresh from their backyard!

Are you interested in helping her out? Drop her an email at csmac22@gmail.com and tell her UrbanChickens.net sent you!

window shopping for chickens

Was inspired by the chicken pictures posted by Lauren over on the Dropstone Farms blog to do some window shopping on Flickr today. And by window shopping, I really do mean admiring without the intent to purchase (relax, LeftCoastMom).

My favorite place to look? Why, the Urban Chickens Flickr group, of course. (the chickens tag on Flickr seems to have been used a little, um, liberally)

Where do you go to get your fix on chicken pix?

Long list of urban chicken ordinances

The folks over at The City Chicken are compiling a long list of laws from US cities regarding keeping (urban) chickens.

I lost track of counting at 112, and the list could be ordered a bit better, but wow, what a fantastic resource!

If you find your own urban chicken-friendly city isn't listed, drop them an email so they can put your info on the list and tell them UrbanChickens.net sent you.

Bureaucratic runaround re: urban chickens in Chicago

Chad Kimball's video exposes the confusing system stacked against anyone trying to get information about keeping urban chickens in Chicagoland. This voyeuristic trip through the bureaucratic maze of Chicago is pretty damning in its exposing the general ineptitude (bordering on hostility?) of the government workers who are supposed to be working for us, right?

Never fear, the outcome is ultimately a good one:

While the City Clerk's office thinks there's an ordinance against chickens (they just can't find it no matter how much they research), the folks in their law department (at the City of Chicago) confirm there is no such ordinance forbidding chickens in the city.

Does this mean urban chickens are legal in the Windy City? Yes, I do believe it does.

Hear that Windy City Gal?