Backyard Chickens

Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, is a backyard chicken enthusiast. Her article about her poultry-keeping passion, “The It Bird”, appears in this week’s New Yorker.  “Chickens seem to be a perfect convergence of the economic, environmental, gastronomic, and emotional matters of the moment,” Orlean writes, “plus, in the past few years, they have undergone an image rehabilitation so astonishing that it should be studied by marketing consultants.” Orlean credits Martha Stewart, who featured pictures of her rare-breed chickens in her 1982 book Entertaining and subsequently in her magazine, for helping to take chicken keeping from a “lowly profession” to the it-thing that’s made Orlean “the object of more pure envy than I have ever experienced in my life.”

You can check out an abstract of Susan Orlean’s article here. (You have to pay to see the entire article on The New Yorker‘s website. But inquire with your local library. They may subscribe to a database that allows you to read magazine articles online for free with a library card.)

National Public Radio’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook also featured backyard chickens today. Susan Orlean was a guest, as was Elaine Belanger , editor of Backyard Poultry. You can listen to the show here.

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Sometime in late July, I become smug about chicken keeping. It’s just like everyone said – easy, peasy. Much easier than taking care of our three spoiled cats, and, an absolute breeze compared to chasing after our toddler. Gertrude, Virginia, Charlotte, and Emily get along, they entertain themselves with all their pecking and scratching, and they march right into their house when it’s time for bed. They don’t need baths or bedtime stories. They don’t get overtired and have foot-stomping tantrums. They don’t somehow pick up the word, “sh*#” and start saying it all the time. Hen keeping is the life.

Then, one morning, I trudge out to the garden … and half of it’s gone. The broccoli looks as though it was put through a paper shredder. The cauliflower, just budding the morning before, is now a stub with some limp strands hanging from it. And the first acorn squash of the season looks like the moon after a meteor storm. I drop to my knees. Was there some kind of hailstorm or elephant-aphid invasion? Then I turn and glimpse my sweet hens ambling across the yard, single file. Oh how lovely and pastoral, I think to myself. Except … they’re coming toward the garden, then they’re descending on it, and their beaks are all over what’s left of the broccoli like a set of jackhammers.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Yes, we knew we needed a fence around the garden. But we also knew we needed to finish painting the kitchen cupboards, repair the gutter on the west side of the house, split the firewood, prune the roses, pull up the miniature birch forest invading our yard, and on and on. In other words, it was on the list.

Oh well, we grew our hens some nutritious, organic vegetables in exchange for some beautiful eggs with bright yellow yolks. A good trade off, right? Except … oh yes, that’s right, they’re not laying eggs yet. No, these girls have decidedly not been earning their keep this summer.

Oh, and one more little thing. You know how I said that they all get along. Well, hmmm, not quite so much anymore. There’s some squabbling, some ruffled feathers, a little pecking – especially between Charlotte and Emily. It’s nothing serious, but it seems there’s some pecking-order tension these days.

However, lest I scare you from adopting a flock of urban hens for your own backyard, I should mention that I just adore these girls. They’ve become like family. They’re well worth some homegrown broccoli, cauliflower, and squash – and that’s saying a lot.

New to the Hen Diaries? Read Weeks One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven, and Eight, Nine, & Ten.

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My husband’s mom is visiting, and she graciously agrees to watch our one-year-old son while my husband and I get some work done.

“You only have three chickens today,” she says when I get home at 6:30. “I haven’t seen the other one since lunch.” The brown hen who’s missing strays from the flock more often than the others. She’s a bit of a loner. She’s probably just hiding.

We scour the yard. We check under the coop three times. We search through our waist-high weed garden and peer under every bush. No feathers. No signs of a scuffle. She’s just gone.

We ask our next-door neighbors to check their yards. Nothing.

We track down a random peeping to a yard four houses down. It’s a bluebird.

I stand in our front yard and scan the block. The yards in our neighborhood are huge. And wooded. She could be anywhere. Or maybe a hawk swooped down and snagged her. I’ve heard that can happen.

We try to carry on with our evening, but it’s not easy. I keep glancing outside and seeing only three chickens scratching and pecking.

Around 8:00, we hear a knock on the door. I race to get it. A young woman stands on our porch … holding our hen. I nearly hug her. This good Samaritan found our girl around the block, and is going door to door looking for her home. Apparently a man at a house down the street bellowed, “She ain’t mine, but I’ll take her” and his four-year-old daughter ran up and swiped the chicken right out of our good Samaritan’s arms. Fortunately she politely insisted on finding our girl’s real home.

We scour the yard once again for any holes under the fence and decide that she must have gone over the fence – perhaps with one of our cats in hot pursuit. Bad kitty. Fortunately she doesn’t seem at all traumatized by the experience. We’re so relieved to have her home, and to have our little flock of four intact again.

In other news, we’re feeling more certain that all four chickens really are hens. No roosters! (Fingers crossed.) It feels like time to officially name our girls. We decide to go with a literary theme and don their house the writer’s co(-)op.

With no further adieu … introducing: Charlotte Bronte, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Emily Dickinson.

New to the Hen Diaries? Read Weeks One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six & Seven.

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I bolt upright. My eyes fly to the clock. It’s five a.m. A scream pierces the silence … then growling. Someone or something is getting hurt. Is it the cats? No. The sound’s coming from outside, from the backyard … from the hen house. I shake my husband. “The chicks…” I sputter. He’s already out of bed, pulling on a shirt, racing outside.

“Come here,” he calls.

I stagger outside. The dawn light is murky and white. It smells like rain; the air’s heavy with moisture. My husband gestures above the chicken coop. Two raccoons stare back at me. They’re in our neighbor’s birch tree, teetering on the branch that extends into our yard.

I drop my gaze to the coop. The door’s latched; the red glow of the brooder light eases from beneath it. The gate to the run is also secure. The hens are okay. I turn my attention back to the raccoons. It could be the uncharacteristic morning mugginess, but for a moment, they look like monkeys and it feels like I’m in Tanzania – not my backyard. We go back to bed, but I don’t sleep much.

A few hours later, I let the hens out for the day. They waddle out of their coop single file and race onto the grass, pecking and scratching. I inspect their run. It looks secure, but raccoons are smart, and they have hands. I’ve heard they can unlatch gates and open coops. They’ll also reach  through a wire fence if you don’t have netting and pull chickens through, or dig underneath. Nighttime in the backyard seems a lot more wild and scary now that we have four vulnerable hens.

A few days later, there’s a knock on the front door. I open it, and my neighbor from across the street is standing on the porch holding both of our brown chickens. “These girls were striding down the middle of the street,” she says. “They walked right by my mini-van.” I put them in their run and search for the hole they squeezed through. It’ll be a lot easier when they’re a little bigger.

We invite some friends over for a barbecue, and the hens are a big hit. The kids run after them and pet them, and most of the adults seem pretty taken with them too. By the end of the night, a number of my friends insist they’re going to get backyard chickens too. A week and a half later, one of them calls. She’s already built a coop and bought four full-grown hens on Craigslist. That morning she ate fresh, backyard eggs for breakfast.

Our hens won’t start laying until August, so I’m jealous that my friend already has eggs. But it’s fun watching our little flock grow up. They’re so friendly with each other and fond of us – I think it’s worth the wait.

New to the Hen Diaries? Read Weeks One, Two, Three, Four, and Five.

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I’m not sure I can really call them chicks anymore. They’re not full-sized, but they have all of their feathers, and they hardly resemble the sweet little balls of fluff they were a short five weeks ago. This week, the plumes around their legs flare out, making them look much more grown up.

The chickens explore every inch of the backyard this week and find ways to slip through the gate into the front yard several times. The second I hear them cheeping in the front yard, life seems to shift into a Three Stooges episode with me trying to wrangle four chickens into the back yard, while keeping three cats at bay and watching a baby. Hijinks tend to ensue. By midweek, we get all the gaps in the gate blocked, and the chickens roam the backyard for much of the day. Near the end of the week, we can even let the cats into the backyard at the same time- with supervision.

We’re feeling more confident that maybe, just maybe, we got four hens. Except – the black (and now white) one without the comb is still much bigger than the other. But it’s turning mostly black, and the other is turning mostly white… so we’re hoping maybe they’re different breeds. We’re waiting to name them until we’re sure we don’t have any roosters – hopefully within the next two weeks.

In the last few weeks, I’ve become increasingly aware of how many words and idioms come from raising chickens: the chickens have come home to roost, cocky, don’t count your chickens before they hatch, full-fledged, chicken-hearted, flew the coop, no spring chicken, rules the roost, and so many more. I can’t help but feel like I’ve joined a big club of English-speaking chicken-keepers.

New to the Hen Diaries? Read Weeks One, Two, Three, and Four.

The chicks wander further from their coop this week. They stay together, pecking grass, eating weeds, and scratching dirt. They discover the shed, and spend hours in there eating spiders. One evening, we come outside, and they’re lined up on the pole to my husband’s old wash-tub bass. They’re sleeping. I rush in to get the camera, but of course, they’re awake by the time I return.

Another day the chicks’ peeps are louder than usual, and I glance outside to see a neighborhood cat streaking across the yard. At first I can’t find the chicks. Then I discover a black one separated from the group, hiding behind the begonias. The others run from beneath their coop, making a beeline for the stray one. They all seem relieved to be reunited and go about their pecking and scratching, seemingly unruffled by the episode.

In the evenings, we don’t have to pick the chicks up to put them in their coop anymore. We stand at the gate and call them, and they run across the yard and file inside single file.

I’m much more fond of these chickens than I imagined I would be. They’re a tight-knit group, but I’m starting to notice some individual personality traits. When I’m taking photos, one yellow chick always steps to the front. It’s almost like she’s posing.

New to the Hen Diaries? Read Weeks One, Two, and Three.