Stop washing your eggs!

It's hard to resist making eggs pretty when they're removed from the nest. But washing your urban chicken eggs is just about the worst thing you can do to them. The first few eggs we got from our hens, I promptly took them out of the nest and straight to the sink to wash off the dirty bits. Can't have any feathers or dirt (or poop!) clinging to the outside of the egg, nosirree.

A clean shell means a good egg, right? Wrong.

My desire to have clean shells was born of all those years buying eggs in the store. My mother taught me to always open the carton at the shelf to see if there were any cracks or breaks or other reasons to try another carton. And I learned that a carton full of clean white shells meant they were good eggs. And good eggs were always refrigerated properly, just like it says on the carton.

Fast forward to my urban chicken years, and I've come to learn something very, very different about eggs farmed from the backyard: once the egg is removed from the nest, there's really no intervention required. Not even refrigeration!

Why? Well, just before the fully-formed egg passes out the vent of a hen, her body adds a moist, protective coating called the bloom. This wet bloom dries quickly when the egg lands in a nest and it becomes a protective shield, covering all the pores in the egg so bacteria and dirt (and even air) can't get inside the egg. The bloom also traps moisture inside the egg so the yolk and albumen don't dry out.

This coating is why eggs can be left out at room temperature for weeks, if not months, and still be edible. This coating is also why a hen can save for several weeks to keep a clutch of a dozen eggs or more in her nest before sitting on them to incubate them into little chicks.

When we wash eggs, we actually remove this bloom, this protective coating, from the shell and at best, make it possible that air gets into the shell and degrades the albumen and yolk (making them runny and less nutritious). At worst, we're effectively pushing the bacteria that was outside the egg shell through the pores and into the inside where it wreaks havoc until we open it. This havoc is only slowed down by our refrigerating the eggs.

So what to do instead of washing your eggs? Try keeping a bit of sandpaper by the coop to sand off any stuck bits. Or a fingernail brush to brush off bits of nesting material, feathers or poop. Just do your best to keep your eggs dry and the bloom intact so nature can protect your eggs as they sit beautifully on the counter.

And if you must, must, must wash them? Do it just before you eat them.

Urban Chickens As Salmonella Carriers? Wash Your Hands!!

This past weekend, Seattle NPR-affiliate KPLU posted Backyard Chickens: Cute, Trendy Spreaders of Salmonella, an article by Nancy Shute. To save you the read, here's a synopsis of the article: sensationalist headline, some scary statistics from an outbreak of salmonella tied to a particular hatchery, concludes with the common-sensical "the CDC says wash your hands to reduce the risk of spreading the disease."

There's a lot of simple wisdom in that directive from the CDC: wash your hands. In fact, the CDC directive applies to reducing risk of transferring diseases to humans from any animals. Well, except for the danger cats pose to pregnant women.

Looking back over four years ago, I published on this blog a series of posts exploring some of the more common concerns I see raised in the debate to allow urban chickens:

• urban chickens and salmonella fears
• what to do with the poop 
• the cost to enforce urban chicken laws
• urban chickens: solving the spread of bird flu

Time to blow the digital dust off those posts as we get into the season renewed urban chicken interest. What's old is new again.

Flickr Photo credit: Microbe World

When to expect that first egg

Photo credit Eric Rice

Chickens, as a species, reach maturity to start laying eggs anywhere between 17 and 26 weeks, depending on the specific breed. This age is referred to as a chickens "point of lay."

Calculating a chicken's point of lay is akin to looking on the back of a seed pack and seeing how many days it takes to harvest the vegetable you're thinking of planting. Some chicken breeds mature earlier than others, so you can take that into account as you're planning your flock.

Aspiring, but impatient, backyard egg farmers can buy pullets at "point of lay" which means they'll be enjoying fresh eggs within a week or so of bringing their hens home. But there's a cost to buying pullets at point of lay, and that's the cost of missing out on watching chicks grow up to be pullets and the imprinting of these chicks on you as their "mother hen."

So there's a bit more planning involved for those of us who are interested in raising our hens from the time they are day-old chicks. The 17-to-26 week guidance is a spread of a full 2 months, in other words, the difference between enjoying your first eggs on Labor Day or on Halloween(!).

Now, as you make plans to start raising chicks, remember to circle a date 4 and a half months after you bring them home as the day to start expecting eggs. Our Plymouth Rock chicks took 20 weeks to lay their first egg, and I have to admit those last three weeks of waiting (from week 17 to week 20) were excruciating!

Growing Your Own Urban Chicken Feed

Flickr photo credit: MrsEds

One of the benefits to raising urban chickens is their willingness to eat just about any food scraps tossed their way and turning that food into delicious eggs.

A quick "chicken feed" search of YouTube videos shows all kinds of variety in what we're feeding our backyard girls: Army Worms, redworms, herbs, special grain grasses, home-milled seeds and grains. Vegetable trash from the local coop grocery, brewery waste, and many others make the list, too.

While commercially produced feeds are available to us urban chicken farmers, the girls seem to do better when they're eating more than what comes from the bag. But is this really good for our chooks?

I've been talking with a formally trained Ag Professional named Jim Ehle who's doing research into how urban chicken farmers are supplementing commercial rations with other fed options. If you supplement commercially produced feed (or skip it altogether) for your urban chickens, Jim would like to hear from you via email. Specifically, what are you feeding them, and is it good for them?

Of course, I'm always happy to have folks share their wisdom here in the comments, and Jim offers to identify and make reference to all that respond if he uses their information in his report/white paper. Also, he will provide a link to your blog, business, or website as a way to say thanks for providing your experiences.

Thank you in advance for sharing your urban chicken feed experiences! 

What to do when chickens no longer lay eggs?

Photo courtesy Flickr user fooferkitten

So what do you do when your hen no longer lays eggs? Keep her around out of gratitude for all those years of eggs? Put her out to (someone else's) pasture? Or do you (gulp!) "process" her?

There's been some traffic on the Silicon Valley Chickens mailing list recently about what to do with old hens, and it seems there's a general agreement that processing an old hen is a rather cruel way to show thanks for eggs well laid.

While some urban chicken keepers seem content to keep the old chooks around for amusement, the more economically minded chicken farmers seem less than enthralled with the idea of all those extra mouths to feed.

And those of us who live where there are tight restrictions on the number of hens allowed in a backyard can't really keep a flock of non-layers around if we're in it for the omelets, can we?

So it seems there's two strategies for mercifully coping with the inevitable aging of hens:

1. Once she stops laying (at age 3 or 4 or 5, depending on your hen's productivity cycle), offer her up  to someone who's got a much larger patch of land and is willing to keep a large non-laying flock. Or,
2. Sell her while she's still in her laying prime, commanding a higher price and making room for another fluffy chick in the coop to start all over again.

What have you done when your chickens stopped laying? Or if you haven't gotten there yet, what are your plans for hens d'un certain âge?

Secret Gardens of the East Bay Follow Up

I had the pleasure of talking all things urban chickens with a group of people who were participating in the 24th Annual Secret Gardens of the East Bay tour over in Oakland yesterday. It was a delightfully beautiful Spring day outside (sunny, mid-70s) and I was impressed that the group of about 30 or so people actually chose to cram into a small classroom to listen to me and ask good questions.

I promised I'd provide them links here on the blog to the urban chicken resources I listed in my blog, so without further ado, a shout out to the following people/places to get your urban chicken on:

• BackyardChickens.com - a strong online community of backyard chicken enthusiasts and just about any question you have about the cluckers, someone at BYC will know the answer.
• MyPetChicken.com - a wonderful online source for small quantities of just the breed of chicks you're looking for. They've got lots of other good chicken supplies and paraphernalia, too, and don't forget to consult their Chicken Selector Tool to help you narrow down your choice of chick!
• FeatherSite.com's Poultry Page - While it hasn't been updated in over a year, the content about chickens is timeless (and rest assured chickens haven't evolved enough in the meantime to warrant any updates).
• Yahoo! Groups related to chickens (like San Mateo Chickens and Silicon Valley Chickens)
• 4-H Clubs
• Meetups

And a big thank you to Nina for coordinating the speaker series and the gift of the awesome Slice of Organic Life book. I can't wait to put the ideas in the book to practice!

Finally, be sure to check out the Poulet Chalets article in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle. It covers much the same information I did in my presentation (but it's in handy-dandy written form).

Reason # 372 to keep urban chickens: they make us self-sufficient

This week has been a great example of why I love writing this blog. Readers know the other day I posted about how efficient chickens are as composters in our backyards.

In response to that post, I got a delightful comment from Pat Foreman going deeper into the issue of chickens and sustainability and how, by raising urban chickens, we're actually doing quite a bit to help sustain this big green planet of ours.

It turns out Pat has written a book based on another book written over 50 years ago, The Have-More Plan: A Little Land – A Lot of Living which inspired millions of people, recovering from World War II, to be more self-sufficient. (NOTE: I haven't read the book yet, but it's on order)

Pat and I exchanged a couple messages and she agreed I could re-post her comment here so we could all benefit. Here it is:

City Chicks: Keeping Micro-flocks of Chickens as Garden Helpers, Compost Makers, Bio-recyclers and Local Food Supplies was written in the same spirt as Robinson’s “The Have-More” Plan from over a half-century ago. The City Chicks book has the ambitious intent of exploring three subjects.

1. Enhancing Backyard Agriculture. Urban gardening and farm-yards are on the verge of a giant leap forward, ushering in a new — and necessary — era of local and home food production. People have a right to grow their own food and chickens have valuable skill-sets that can be employed in food production systems. Some of these “skill-sets” include producers of manure for fertilizer and compost, along with being mobile herbiciders and pesticiderers. And of course, they also provide eggs and meat. City Chicks shows how you can have a good meal of eggs and garden goods that only travel the short distance from your backyard.

2. Diverting Food and Yard “Waste” Out of Landfills. Chickens can help convert biomass “wastes” into organic assets such as fertilizer, compost, garden soil and eggs. This can save BIG TIME tax payer dollars from being spent solid waste management streams.

3. Decrease Oil Consumption and Lower Carbon Footprints. Commercial food systems cannot work without oil. Over 17% of America’s oil is used in agricultural production and, about 25% of this oil is used for fertilizer. The total energy input of food production, processing, packaging, transporting and storing is greater than the calories consumed. It is estimated that every person in this country requires about one gallon of oil per day just to bring food to the table. How sustainable is that? Chickens can help America kick the oil habit by decreasing the amount of oil products used in feeding ourselves ... and, at the same time, keep landfills from filling up with methane-producing organic matter.

City Chicks ushers in a new paradigm of how to use chickens in a variety of roles that help decrease carbon footprints, save tax payer dollars and support local food supply production. And all this is done in a way that is biologically sustainable, economically equitable, and serves us, our communities, our Earth and the future generations of all beings.

How do you become a Chicken Have-More Club member? You already are! Anyone who is participating in the local foods movements, who believes they have a right to produce their own food, and/or who is interested in conservation ways to help restore and preserve our environment is automatically a club member.

So Pat's comment, coupled with my attending a delightful workshop on raising urban chickens led by Alexis Keofoed of Soul Food Farm and hosted at 18 Reasons in San Francisco has made this a wonderful week for the Urban Chickens Network.

Here's hoping you have a wonderful weekend with your chooks if you've got them, or with your planning and prepping if you don't.

And as Pat likes to say, "may the flock be with you!"

Do urban chickens attract urban rats?

Ewww, what's up with all these @#$! rats?

The sudden arrival of rodents in the neighborhood is an issue no one particularly likes. And when they do arrive (or simply come out of hiding), folks are quick to try and find someone or something to blame.

Enter urban chickens to take the blame.

I fear some urban chicken proponents might be too quick to state that urban chickens are NOT the reason rats show up in a neighborhood.

Let's look at the rat facts as related by Judy Haley in her ChronicleHerald.ca article, "Urban chickens bring urban rats":

1. rats flock to food sources; 
2. they remain close to the food source and breed; 
3. rats are attracted to bird seed and chicken feed; 
4. if rats were already present, they multiply once a new food source is introduced; and 
5. areas of clutter also provide nesting spots for rats.

I won't argue with any of the above facts (I had a pet rat in college and can see each of these as true). Moreover, I can see where irresponsible storage of food or upkeep of one's yard could contribute to many of the attractions for rats.

However, to link the appearance of urban rats solely on the keeping of chickens in an urban setting seems to be using a bit too broad a brush to paint the blame. There are many food sources, not the least of which is improper keeping of trash in between pickups, leaving kibble in a bowl for "outdoor cats" or yard-kept dogs, seeds and pellets in a bird feeder, etc.

Responsible urban chicken farmers know to keep a clean coop, to only put as much feed as necessary out for the chooks while storing the rest in an air- and water-tight container, and disposing of any coop clutter (poop, nesting material, etc) quickly and thoroughly.

So, yes, the opportunity is there for irresponsible urban chicken keeping to attract rats, but common sense (which unfortunately seems in short supply in some places) should help keep rats from becoming a problem.

Have you noticed rats around your hen house? How have you taken care of the problem?

UPDATE (2/22): Following a discussion on rats on a listserv, I found this great resource from UC IPM on how to "manage" rats: Rat Management Guidelines.

Photo Credit: Matthieu A. on Flickr

Urban Chickens help teach children about food

I'm a huge fan of Jamie Oliver, naked chef and -- more recently -- food activist.

Just a year after I became an urban chicken farmer, I started seeing Oliver's work in England on behalf of chicken welfare. He's been credited with convincing some of the larger grocers in the UK to stop purchasing battery hens -- those chickens raised in horrid cramped conditions for the 39 days it takes to get from chick to plucked carcass in the local meat section.

Now, Oliver is setting his sights on the obesity epidemic caused by the crap food the majority of us eat day in and day out. I'm thrilled to see he received a TED prize this past week. You can watch the video here: Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food. It's about 21 minutes long, but it's worth every moment.

There's a jaw-dropping section at about the 11:00 mark (captured above) where Oliver is in a classroom with kids, holding up vegetables and quizzing the kids what they are. They can't identify them. They simply don't know what fresh vegetables look like. It's insane.

One of the things I love about raising urban chickens is that it teaches kids, in such a remarkably visceral way, where their food comes from.

Yummy eggs come from happy chickens. And happy chickens are loved and cared for daily. And that's why they, the kids, should be taking good care of their chickens. It just makes perfect sense to them when they see it. I'd dare say it'd make perfect sense to anyone when they see it.

Which is why we need to find more ways to get people to know where their food comes from.

Go, watch the video now. As a Valentine's day gift to the ones you love, watch it and learn and then do something to help teach kids about food.

May you be flooded in eggs this year.

Fresh grass for urban chickens all year long

Urban chickens love their greens, sometimes (often?) to the detriment of existing landscaping. Hens don't much care how much a plant costs you to replace, they just care if it's yummy or not.

Yes, there's been many an urban chicken farmer who, with best intentions, has moved their run on top of the grass for a day or so only to come back to find a patch of dirt under some rather content hens. So, how to provide your girls with greens, especially when it's still cold and snowy out still (in most of the country, at least)?   

Mary D was kind enough to send me an email sharing her instructions for providing fresh greens to your urban hens.

I get unhulled seed, (whatever is available) at our local Co op, and rotate four trays of seed growing continuously. When I start seed, I lay it down thick on potting soil, cover with a piece of newspaper, keep the newspaper moist, and keep covered with a plastic wrap, until seed really gets sprouting.

I do all of this on a grow rack in our house throughout the winter and each day our hens get a 1/2 flat of fresh grass.

This is wheat berry growing in the above pictures, but I experiment with any grain I can find. They love it!

As soon as one tray is empty I start another. From seed to "chicken ready" is usually 7 days. 4-6 trays keep you in grasses for 8 hens.

Bonus: you can find all kinds of quantities of grass seed ready to be shipped from Amazon.

Thanks for the tip, Mary. I know you're making a lot of snow-bound urban chickens very happy!

What do you do to keep your urban chickens getting their greens during the long winter months?

UPDATE: Derek, from mypetchicken.com, chimes in with this little tip he got on growing grass in trays: "add a hardware cloth top to the trays (might have to make the trays out of wood) and let the grass grow through.  This way the chickens can eat the grass, but not scratch up all the dirt and require reseeding the trays every time.  You can cycle a couple of the trays so that they always have fresh grass"

Urban Chickens on the Rise? Follow the Money

At last, there's some interesting economic data about urban chickens in an article by Brendan Murray over on BusinessWeek.com.

Brendan had interviewed me about urban chickens earlier this month, and when he asked how big the urban chickens movement is, I gave the answer I give all reporters: I'm not sure, but there's got to be sales data for feed and chicks and whatnot available to show this urban chicken movement is real.

And when his article about the fight to legalize urban chickens in Washington, DC, posted online, I was thrilled to see he'd actually done some investigating on the economics.

Two highlights:

• Ideal Poultry Breeding Farms (Cameron, TX) says sales to customers who buy just a few chicks has grown from less than 2% of Ideal's sales a decade ago to almost 35% of sales last year. (They shipped 4.5 million chicks last year)
• Land O'Lakes Purina Mills, while not disclosing the numbers, sees sales increasing of its 25- and 50-pound bags of feed for adult birds, and this year is marketing a 5-pound package of feed for baby chicks, tailor-made for us urban chicken farmers. If a company that size is getting into the market, you know the MBAs have crunched away the data and see significant money to be made.

I know our local Feed & Fuel has seen a dramatic rise in selling chicken feed (again, no numbers, just an anecdotal observation by the owner) over the last few years.

Anyone else out there have firm data showing the growth of the urban chicken market?

I have a hunch that our showing the economic benefits of allowing urban chickens might be another arrow in our quiver trying to get hens legal inside city limits.

Photo credit to zizzybaloobah on Flickr

Animal Sanctuaries Need Your Help

With so many people deciding to try their hand at raising urban chickens, it's inevitable that some aren't finding success and have to give up their chooks. Whether they find themselves with a rooster due to inaccurate sexing or simply didn't understand the responsibility of caring for an animal 24/7/365, someone ultimately has to take care of the birds.

While Craigslist and online chicken groups are good resources that conscientious urban chicken farmers use to try to find new homes, less savvy folks simply take their birds to the local animal shelter and drop them off, or worse, take the birds to the edge of town and let them loose.

Here's where animal sanctuaries step in to help. And what with the surge in popularity of urban chickens, the sanctuaries are busier than ever. So, while we're celebrating this season of giving, I hope you'll consider donating to your local animal sanctuary.

A few animal sanctuaries have formed a Coalition Concerned with Chicken Welfare and you can support them at their web sites (listed below). While I don't condone the Coalition's ham-fisted approach to chicken welfare by urging municipalities to outlaw urban chickens, these organizations provide a valuable service in providing chickens a refuge of last resort.

• Animal Place (Northern California)
• Chicken Run Rescue (Minneapolis/St Paul area)
• Eastern Shore Sanctuary & Education Center (Vermont)
• Farm Sanctuary (New York and California)
• Sunnyskies Bird & Animal Sanctuary (New York)
• United Poultry Concerns (Virginia)
  

Photo credit: LiminalMike on Flickr

Coalition Sees Sky Falling Due to Urban Chickens

This past Friday, a coalition of animal sanctuaries "Concerned with Chicken Welfare" sent out a press release calling for an end to the practice of keeping backyard chickens.

Their big beef? Too many roosters (which remain illegal in the majority of places where urban chickens are legal) are winding up at sanctuaries, overwhelming the resources of said sanctuaries.

I can't argue with their concern about the roosters, but I can, and will, argue about their proposal to remedy the situation by taking away the rights of anyone to keep chickens in their backyards. They seem think that if urban chickens are illegal, it will dry up the demand for chickens and solve the problem of abandoned roosters.

We've seen this movie before in America's so-called War on Drugs, haven't we? By making drugs illegal, the problem magically solved itself, right?

Wrong.

And the coalition's Position Statement on Backyard Poultry (beware: it downloads a PDF) reads like a well-meaning but ultimately feeble attempt at singling out urban backyard flocks as the cause of poultry raising ills. My scan of their list of concerns brings the following alternatives to mind:

• If, as they say, there are no legal requirements dictating how breeding hens and roosters are kept, let's change the laws to require humane treatment (as is required of the egg-layers)
• If, as they say, shipping day-old chicks is cruel, let's figure out a better way to get chickens from the breeders to the customers
  
• If, as they say, sexing chicks is such a problem that "between 20-50% of purchased 'hens" are actually roosters," let's figure out how to sex chicks better
• If, as they say, professional medical care for urban chickens is lacking, let's educate our veterinarians

And the coalition's list of problems continues trying to present problems as insurmountable, so-let's-ban-them-all.

While I'm in favor of the service these sanctuaries provide, I'm dumb-founded as to their backward thinking on how to solve the issue of unwanted roosters. Shame on them for their tactics.

It's a pity this is how they have to behave to get attention. I'll follow up later this week with more about the coalition and how you can support their efforts to provide sanctuary for unwanted birds despite their bungling the call to ban urban chickens.

Photo credit: hghwtr on Flickr

urban chickens: controlling the feed of your food

This little gem about how keeping your own urban chickens means truly knowing where your food comes from is just one of the great soundbites from the wonderful two-part video interview of the "Toronto Chicken Lady" posted by David Sheen over on the Green Apple Landscaping blog. The video interview is a followup to his earlier post on Backyard Chickens.

Since chickens are still illegal in the Toronto's residential neighbourhoods, the interview subject's identity is obscured, but that doesn't hinder her from sharing tons of urban chicken wisdom from the ins-and-outs of daily urban chicken keeping to all the benefits that come from keeping hens in your backyard.

If you're thinking about keeping chickens in your own backyard (or trying to convince your partner that it's a good idea, really!), you could do a lot worse than spending 15 minutes listening to the Toronto Chicken Lady talking about the benefits of raising your own hens.

I notice that she's got a partial list on her Toronto Chickens site of places where chickens are legal. It's no surprise that there are so many more places where they're legal in the USA than in Canada, but wow, you'd think our neighbors up north would be a bit more progressive on this front.

And you've heard it before, and I'll say it again: I've started to compile a list of the exact ordinances making chickens legal over on the Urban Chickens Network Legal Resource Center where visitors can easily see the technical language employed by cities to legalize chickens. If you live in a place where chickens are legal, please add your city's name to the list so we can capture the municipal code and flesh out the resource center. Thanks!

Find an urban chicken farmer near you!

While sites like MyPetChicken and BackyardChickens are great resources for figuring out how chickens work in a general sense, there's nothing like having someone from your neighborhood to chat with about local sources of supplies, the effects of weather on the flock, and how to keep local predators at bay.

With urban chicken owners popping up all over the place, it's getting easier to find someone in your neighborhood who's got chickens in their backyard:

• Search Yahoo! groups or Google Groups (each of these links drops you on the results for "chicken") to see who's already talking about chickens near you. Join the group and have the discussions emailed to you in a daily digest so you can scan the topics to see what interests you. Listen first, then jump in and ask or offer advice once you're comfortable.
• Join a Meetup of fellow chicken enthusiasts. There are at least 835 urban chicken meetups happening across the country each month! The best thing about meetups: you get to mingle with fellow chicken owners face-to-face and swap tips and tales in real time. If there's no meetup already existing around you, you can sign up to be notified when one does get started (or start one yourself!)
  
• Find the 4-H nearest you and ask about their poultry program. Do a google search on 4-H and your town name to get the contact coordinates for the local program. Unfortunately the National 4-H program is a complete mess when it comes to helping you find a local poultry program, so you're best off just using google to find what you need.

For those of us in the Bay Area, here's just a short list of sources for connecting with fellow urban chicken farmers:

• Silicon Valley Chickens on Yahoo
• San Mateo Chickens on Yahoo
• Santa Cruz County Chickens on Yahoo
• Alameda Backyard Chickens on Yahoo
• East Bay Backyard Chickens on Google
• Fairfax Chickens on Google
• SF Pet Chicken Meetup
  
• Santa Cruz Pet Chicken, Duck, Poultry Meetup

Know of others here in the Bay Area? let me know, and I'll be happy to add them to the list.

Got a list of local resources of your own? Please share it in the comments below!

Photo credit: Daniel Miller/My Standard Break from Life on Flickr

simply put: get your urban chickens now

Caught this nice summary of why you'd want to raise your own chickens over on the FriendsEAT blog:

It’s a way to save money on grocery bills, it allows families to take control of their food supply by practicing “eating local,” it encourages sustainability and reduces the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture. Plus the eggs, which are an excellent source of protein, will be fresh, flavorful and plentiful, depending on how many hens are in your harem.

Lots more goodness in the rest of the post, but I haven't seen the "why urban chickens?" put so succinctly well before. What are you waiting for?

Photo credit: ztephen on Flickr

How to handle neighbors' complaints

With legal urban chickens becoming more commonplace, it's inevitable that some of our less-enlightened neighbors would call to complain about the new noises our chickens are making in the neighborhood.

I've seen a rash of reports in the Yahoo! chicken groups recently about neighbors complaining about perfectly legal urban chickens doing perfectly normal chicken things. It's the neighbors that seem a bit, well, uptight and unreasonable. (Our legal chickens have been reported by an anonymous neighbor, too)

A certain discussion's been tumbling around the Silicon Valley Chickens Yahoo! Group discussion regarding an urban chicken owner whose neighbor called in the city to investigate her chickens saying there was a rooster on premises (there wasn't). Upon finding there was no rooster, the enforcement officer then cited the owner for having a "too small yard" and asked the owner to get signatures from neighbors agreeing the chickens were okay. Not an unreasonable request, right?

Lisa "the Chicken Lady" Green then added a gem to the discussion:

It feels so horrible to have this happen. Write a letter to accompany your neighbor's signatures. Include the fact that most chickens are usually kept legally in coops with a 4'squ / bird recommendation. Therefore your yard should be adequate. I have seen very successful 4-H coop/run combos for up to fifteen full sized hens that measure three by eight covered with wall mount laying boxes and a three by ten open run ( 3.5'/bird).

Remember to note the change in complaint in your letter, of course state it as an error. Go on line and read carefully the ordinance. If you are within legal limits and there is no "neighbor complaint" clause you may be OK. You can often use the letter of the law to your advantage, (and of course the overwhelming support of most of your neighbors). Also remember that the officer that came out may not have had all the facts. People don't always to their jobs properly. You can also contact UC Davis and your local 4-H for advice and arm yourself with their standards for care.

See if you can get to the Animal Control Dispatch supervisor. Describe your situation and request that the complaining neighbor be contacted. Sometimes and offer to see the set up, try some eggs, and work out solutions is all it takes. They won't let you contact them but could pass along the message and request a meeting. Some people complain not because they really are affected by the noise but because they don't like anyone to get away with anything. If they thought you had a rooster and find out that you don't that may be it. (Or they may have used that to get Animal Control to come out).

But we need to fight these things.

I agree with Lisa, we do need to fight these things. It's understandable that we need to be considerate of people's wanting relative quiet in our urban neighborhoods, but when chickens are singled out unfairly, we need to push back.

It's amazing how effectively the brain can become accustomed to the sound of horns, sirens, dogs, kids and other urban dwellers yet the clucking of a chicken will be the proverbial straw breaking the camel's back. As chickens become more integrated into urban life again, hopefully the clucking and bawking will fade into the background like all the other urban sounds we've become used to.


BTW, did you know there are over 3,600 Yahoo! groups relating to chickens, you really should find one near you to join as they're full of good neighborly advice like what Lisa's sharing, and they'll let you know what other chickens around you are experiencing in terms of molt, reaction to storms, etc.

Photo Credit: artwerk by alphadesigner on Flickr

urban chickens now legal in New Haven!

So happy to see Board of Aldermen in New Haven, Connecticut (pop ~124,000, View Larger Map) did the right thing by passing an ordinance to allow New Haven city residents to keep up to six hens in their backyards.

This victory comes after months of sometimes rancorous banter back and forth (this particular fight was the source of the regretful "Only two kinds of urban chicken farmer" editorial back in March.)

What I appreciate the most about the New Haven Independent's coverage of the meeting in City Hall is how it sheds a light on the kind of shenanigans that politicians are willing to pull to scuttle something they don't want to see pass (yes, I'm talking about you Alderwoman Arlene DePino).

Thank goodness for the likes of "Chicken Champion" Roland Lemar to keep the ordinance on track, fending off DePino's motions to table/alter the effort at the meeting.

This should be a lesson to all you trying to get the laws changed to allow urban chickens in your own town: no matter how rational an argument you've prepared, no matter how well you've dispelled the myths about urban chickens (witness the follow-up comments to the story on the New Haven Independent site), you're going to run up against the whims and waffling of elected officials who'd much rather see things remain as they are (unless there's money for the campaign by making the change).

Find yourself a Chicken Champion, and then work with that person to identify others who can be counted on when it really matters: when it's time to vote.

how to add another chicken to your flock?

It's been almost a week since Sophia died, and I think ZsuZsu, the surviving chicken must be lonely out there (she's noisy every morning).

Surprisingly, I got the final results back from the necropsy performed by the CAHFS Lab already, and their conclusion as to why Sophia died? They don't know why (although they used more scientific terms than that). At the very least, we know she didn't die of any infectious disease thanks to their tests.

So, knowing we don't have something communicable in our remaining flock of one, we can think of building it up again. ZsuZsu is back to laying eggs again, and I'm anxious to get her a companion to share the Eglu out in the backyard.

As with all things chicken-related, I've been doing some research on the subject of adding a new chicken to the flock, and I gotta tell you: this isn't as easy as dropping another goldfish in the aquarium.

Among the finer points of "how to introduce the new bird" which present a challenge:

• To accommodate biosecurity concerns, we'll need to keep the new bird separated from ZsuZsu for anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 weeks depending on which resource you choose to heed. We certainly don't want to get ZsuZsu sick from a companion, no matter how lonely she is. Keeping them separated, however, presents a bit of a challenge in our backyard, and we'll need to get yet another temporary pen/house to do so.
• To accommodate behavioral concerns, we're going to need to find a way to provide room in the Eglu (run is 7'x3', coop is 2.5'x2.5') for the newbie to get away from ZsuZsu, or vice versa, while they establish the pecking order. While I'd love to think ZsuZsu is easy-going and will quickly warm up to whatever new bird we bring in, I also need to be prepared for them to not get along.

Most of the online resources I've read regarding adding a chicken to the flock are dealing with more than a one-on-one introduction, and obviously dealing with a coop bigger than our Eglu. So, as usual I'll be keeping you posted on our experience in our particular setup to add to the corpus of knowledge around raising urban chickens.

Talking things over with LeftCoastMom, we've agreed we don't want to start raising a week-old chick at this point of the year. I'm getting ready to do some pretty heavy travel in the next few months, and the room in which we raised Sophia and ZsuZsu two years ago has been converted into a painting/crafts room for our daughters.

So that leaves us to get a months-old pullet. I've found a local source, Ranch Hag Hens, from which to get the chicken (we'll decide on the breed from what they have available when we get there: either a Rhode Island or an Orpington or a Brahma). And they're not too far away, just 90 minutes north of us.

Now, before digging into the finer points of adding chickens to an existing flock, I'd thought I could take my daughters with me on the drive up and over the Golden Gate Bridge tomorrow to visit Ranch Hag Hens and pick out a new chicken.

It depends now on how much prep work I can get done today to set up a temporary new coop and run in the backyard today. Wish me luck.

"Vacancy" Photo Credit: Jeremy Brooks on Flickr

what do you do when your chicken dies?

Sophia, our 2-1/2 year-old Barred Rock hen, passed away sometime in the triple-digit heat of Saturday afternoon. My wife found her in a heap in the back corner of the coop at the end of the day when she went out to check on their water and food.

Once I'd quickly processed and suppressed the emotional side of the situation, I went into "dad mode" and began exploring, rapid-fire, all the questions popping into my head:

How do I get her out of the coop? Is it something contagious? Is ZsuZsu ok? Where are my gloves? What do I do with the body? Do we bury her in the yard? Do we dispose of her in the garbage? Will she smell by the time the garbage is collected on Friday? Why did she die? What did I do wrong? How do I tell the kids? Do we get another chicken? Two more chickens? How do I introduce ZsuZsu to new companions? Where will we get them? and on and on

I ultimately decided I need to know what happened to Sophia before I can think of bringing another urban chicken into our backyard.

Thanks to the Santa Cruz Pet Chicken avian flu workshop I went to earlier this year, I knew that I could get a free necropsy performed on Sophia at the California Animal Health & Food Safety Laboratory over at UC Davis. While it costs the big-Ag chicken farmers to get the service performed, for us backyard folks in California, it's free.

All I had to do was wrap Sophia's body in two plastic bags and then put it in the refrigerator until the lab opened up Monday morning and drop her off there.

The only problem? No room in our fridge. I'd have to store her in a cooler on ice. Well, truth be told, our fridge could've been completely empty but my lovely wife wouldn't have let me store Sophia in there. Not enough Lysol in the world to disinfect the mental imagery.

So, I double-bagged Sophia and put her in our old collapsible cooler with ice around her in zip-loc bags (no, I didn't want to have to deal with wet feathers). I placed the cooler in the corner of the garage, and for the next 36 hours, added ice as needed to keep her cool.

Then I woke up at dawn Monday morning to drive the 99 miles to UC Davis to the lab, arriving shortly before 8am. I parked the car across the lot from the receiving dock.

The nice lady at the receiving desk gave me a simple form to fill out and a white plastic tub to place Sophia's body in (still wrapped in the bags, of course).

They'll email me preliminary results in a couple days with final results expected in two weeks.

As I walked out of the lab, I realized I'd parked right next to the dumpster. How convenient. I flipped the collapsible cooler into the dumpster before I hopped in the car to make the drive home. Wouldn't ever be using that particular cooler for food or drinks again. Not enough Lysol in the world to clean out the mental imagery of carrying Sophia in there.

Photo by zirofar on Flickr