The Chick Life

So, you know, my neighbors now walk by my house and just interact with me in neighborly ways, like we live in 1950's Minnehaha or something, and I don't entirely know what to do with it. I get the feeling sometimes that my neighbors have been watching each other watch me, and deciding whether or not to receive my flock of chickens in the spirit with which they were added to my household--that Barbara Kingsolverian aesthetic of eating whole foods, eating locally, reducing fossil fuels, enriching the topsoil, composting waste, preserving heritage breeds--and not the hillbilly hicktown yard full of tires scenario a bunch of plywood and chicken wire can evoke. Obviously my mental portrait of myself and my chickens--me, floating around in my fitted waist 1950's organza dress, perfect for 1950's Minnehaha suburbia, laughing melodically as I curate my flock of exquisite fowl with their delicately patterned plumage, transforming humble patches of wild clover into golden-yolked pods of pure, ethereal nourishment--is not always and entirely in sync with reality.

Sometimes there are pencil skirts.

But for the most part my neighbors seem to have decided that chickens are "so hot right now". Everybody that stops to talk has thought about having chickens of their own and wants to know how you go about it. It doesn't hurt that it's almost Easter and there are literally chicks in the pet store that you could take home and put in a basket, Ala 1950's Minnehaha. And why shouldn't you? chickens are awesome. Besides the obvious, get eggs without driving to the store, thing, chickens:

--Eat weeds. I never realized how satisfying it would be after a lifetime of battling dandelions and spurge and chickweed (ah, that's why it's called that) to watch chickens chow down and devour literally every blade and leaf of a huge patch of dandelions. They are voracious and ferocious and descend upon those weeds with the exact murderous passion I feel for those weeds, except that my hen assassins take weeding one step further and transform those weeds into eggs that I can make into cupcakes. 

--Are entertaining. Who knew scratching chickens could evoke a Zen trance state? Since we put the pullets out into the backyard, every dinner party we've had, no matter how highly educated, fascinatingly well-read, and articulate the guests are has degenerated into a bring the margaritas out into the backyard and, fascinated, watch the chickens scratch for bugs in the dirt-stravaganza. It's so peaceful, it's hypnotic. I often push their movable coop to a different patch of clover in the front yard and suddenly realize I've been sitting in the grass watching them graze without moving for an hour. This can't have been a thing with prairie people. It has to somehow be a commentary on our stressful lives but I can't think about that at the moment, the hens just found a new patch of crabgrass.

--Lay eggs in the tall grass. I pasture my hens in a movable run and let them hang out in the front yard all day eating my feral lawn, which means they lay their eggs right out there in the grass. Since
fresh eggs have a "bloom" or a protective membrane on them (commercial egg farmers clean this off so the eggs are shiny) they stay fresh without refrigeration, so I usually collect the eggs in the evening when I put the hens to bed in their coop. Since it's dusk, it becomes a bit of an egg hunt, looking around to see if I can find the coppery, chocolate colored eggs hidden in amidst the green grass; they're cool to the touch from the soil and the dew-damp grass, and comfortably solid in the palm of my hand. 

--Put themselves to bed. Chickens have a strong roosting instinct that kicks in at dusk. Their movable run has a little ladder and if darkness fall before I have a chance to send them to their coop they will all climb the ladder and snuggle together on the top step in a huge fluffy pile. Otherwise I open the door to their run and they take off in a mad, zig-zag dash like they're avoiding sniper fire, making for the backyard gate and the safety of their coop. They look for all the world like extremely short, comically pudgy women with ruffled petticoats running with their arms glued to their sides, frantically shrieking to each other, "The Darkness! It comes!"

--Are themselves the source of all chicken-related idioms. Birds of a feather flock together. Yep. Chicken scratch. Yes, it is cheap as hell. Bird brain. Ruffle your feathers. Pecking order. The sky is falling. Dumb cluck (I'm sorry. I love my black and white Maran but she is just dumb as a rock). The only one that doesn't apply is Mad as a wet hen. They don't seem to care if they get wet and will stay out in the rain all day even though they have shelter.

Not to mention their poo, which is a compost kick starter and makes amazing manure in the garden; their eggs, which are far more flavorful and have beautiful golden yolks. They require about the same amount of care as a parakeet--fill the feeder and waterer and once a month (once every few months if you use a deep litter method) muck out the coop. They are sweet and personable and funny. 

But I recently read a book called "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter" that left me furious when the author disparaged backyard chickens as little more than pets. In summary, she had bought a half dozen chicks on a whim and ended up with a flock of over a dozen, some ridiculous ornamental breeds which don't realistically lay in any proliferation, and set them up in an old playhouse as their coop without a protected run. Needless to say, she lost ten of the original flock when dogs got under her chain link fence and into her flock in a bloody rampage. In response, she put up a $3500 redwood fence to surround the property--and with that as her startup cost, she warned her readers away from thinking backyard chickens would ever be cost effective. 

Look. 

Chickens on the urban farm definitely have a higher cost than just the $5 chick you buy. Equipment includes their waterer and feeder, litter, and of course their feed. We didn't buy a special brooder but just used a heat lamp in our bathroom for them until the chicks got big enough to hop out of the bathtub. The biggest cost was the coop and their movable run, which we built ourselves but probably would have been cheaper to have made. All told, those three $5 chicks cost us $700 in start up fees. But this year, when we bought our new batch of chicks, we had all that stuff and the chicks only cost us $10. In fact every year from this point on...and we plan to have chickens for the next ten, twenty years. If you don't blame your desire for landscape architecture on your chickens, the costs over time stay pretty darn reasonable and actually do start making themselves back in the ratio of eggs to feed.

The other detractor to backyard chickens is a pretty common conversation I have with people who don't know that in San Diego at least, the zoning laws restrict homeowners to no more than five chickens. Chickens lay well for their first year, which actually only starts at 4-6 months (one of ours didn't start laying until the end of her sixth month) and start to taper off after that, like Henopause. chickens live much longer than that, 5-8 years and sometimes as much as 12-16 years if they're, say, pasture raised on good food and live in a humane hygenic environment like an urban farm. so if a person like myself wants a steady supply of eggs, I can alternate years of getting chicks, as I did--my new babies won't start laying until my first group of hens are going through their molting period--and I can keep them laying longer by not forcing them to overlay with weird medicated feeds and lighting their coop at night so their bodies are tricked into constant production; but ultimately my hens are going to stop laying and I'm going to be feeding a crowd of weed eaters with no eggs to show for it and no ability to get new hens to replace the ones that aren't laying. 

"Can you give them to a farm?" one of my well meaning friends asked. Absolutely. What farm wouldn't love the privilege of feeding my spent hens, at no cost to me, with nothing to show for it? There must be some lovely places that would board my old hens, where they can go and retire in style and drink crabgrass juleps on the porch and bawk about the snails they've eaten. In fact another chicken owning friend of ours generously asked if we might be running such a place, and whether we would like five of their hens, who were two years old and coincidentally mostly done with their egg-producing years. 

Nope. We are not running such a place, and therein lies the biggest drawback with chicken ownership. If you want eggs and there's a limit on how many hens you can have, you have to do what's kindly termed "culling". 

"Oh my God," more than one of my friends has said in horror. "I could never kill a chicken." 

Yes, it's pretty horrible to think about until you take a look at how a commercial chicken lives its life, packed into a battery cage with the space of about a letter sized piece of paper, its feathers falling out from the stress of such terrible confinement, in a windowless room without ever feeling the sun or tasting anything but commercial chicken feed. Commercial chicken feed, by the way, is anything from corn to chopped up fish, beef and chicken remnants--yes chickens eat chicken. Even a so-called cage free chicken can just live in that same windowless warehouse, crowded into the same amount of space but without cages, walking in the feces of a thousand other chickens daily, certainly ingesting those feces in the air and in their food and putting that right into their eggs and the meat we all eat. Not to mention the inhumane treatment of birds who are debeaked, and the disgusting ways in which they're killed--electric shocks, gassing-- and processed (I'm still haunted by the pink slime video that shows how Mcdonalds mcnuggets are processed, beaks, entrails, blood and all, and bleached into something resembling white meat). Commercial chickens could also live to 5-8 years but rarely are allowed to live past one year because they just don't lay reliably after that. Meat chickens make it to about six weeks when they've been force fed to the point their weight exceeds their ability to stand. 

My chickens will have lived every day in the sunshine, eating what nature intended them to; they'll have been together in a flock which they love, in peaceful companionship, in an enriched environment, healthy and happy. When the time comes for them to be culled it'll be quick and humane. When you think of the misery that had to happen for the nugget in your hand to get to you...what's really worse? 

For me, taking responsibility for the eggs we eat is one small thing we can do to live more sustainably. The shiny white eggs Vons peddles certainly come with the same price tag attached, we just don't have to look it in the face. Frankly if I have to look anything in the face? It should really look like this.