My husband was mobbed when he came through the door one evening
in late February. The kids and I had been waiting all day for what was in the
box he carried under one arm, and he came home to a greeting worthy of a rock
star.
“Shhh,” he said to our daughters. “Listen. What sound do you
hear in the box?” There was only a short silence before we heard scratching and
peeping through the cardboard. As he slowly removed the loose lid, our four new
Ameraucana chickens were revealed: two pale yellow with spots, two with stripes
and all of them as small as the eggs from which they hatched just three days
before. Ameraucanas are a breed of chicken with fluffy cheek and chin feathers
and that lay eggs with tinted shells; purebred hens lay blue eggs, while
non-purebred hens might lay eggs of blue, green, olive or even lavender tints.
On that evening, however, they were just tiny balls of fluff that started a
wonderful adventure for our family. In each stage of their development from
newly hatched chicks to laying their first eggs, the chickens were an
experiential learning opportunity like no other.
Like many families, ours is part of the growing movement of
people who prefer to eat local, sustainable food and to teach our children the
importance of those choices. Eggs are an example of something easily purchased
from a case in any grocery store, often originating from a large commercial
enterprise, but that can be had for the same or lower cost by keeping some hens
in a backyard coop. Even if the cost for a dozen eggs works out the same for
organic, (outdoor) free-range eggs from either source, there is a priceless
benefit that can’t be found in the store: seven months of learning while
watching those little fluff balls grow up into a small flock of chickens right
in the backyard.
The night the chicks came home with my husband, we held and
snuggled them briefly before putting them into the brooder box in the kitchen.
Our children, then ages six and two, had spent the previous two weeks helping to
make the brooder, crawling in and out of it, pretending to nest in it, taking it
apart and putting it back together again. They dug their hands into bags of
organic chick feed, pine shavings and grit, feeling the differences in texture.
We encased the box with plastic baby-gate sections to protect the chicks from
our indoor cat (and, admittedly, our toddler) and hung the heat lamp inside to
keep the chicks at a steady temperature without a mama hen’s soft down. A
thermometer was inside so the girls could see how hot it was in the chicks’ new
home and help us know whether the brooder was too hot or cold.
By the time the chicks arrived, the brooder was warm, food and
water dishes were full, and soft towels had been placed over the shavings to
keep the chicks from eating their bedding instead of the organic feed for the
first few days.
Every day, we held the chicks out of the brooder and played with
them loose in the kitchen for at least an hour to socialize them and keep them
friendly. In addition to acclimating the birds to humans, our daily chick social
hour taught the children to be caretakers of these fragile creatures and to use
the gentlest of touches when holding small chicks. They watched the chicks eat,
eat, eat and then fall down like a dead bird for a 90-second power nap. For the
first few days, that sight was more than a little disturbing, but when the
chicks jumped up from their naps and ran around to see what they missed while
they were asleep, the children squealed with delight. Every day brought new joy
of discovery. Flocking behavior, feathers, perching, flying! Sitting on the
kitchen floor with chicks hopping up on laps and shoulders, playing tug-of war
with tasty treats and practicing flying with their new feathers was the
highlight of our daughters’ day and they soaked up answers to endless questions
about the chickens.
With adult feathers and at nearly two months old, the chicks
were ready to transition from our kitchen to the backyard. A family construction
project to build the chickens a coop became a priority as they outgrew the
brooder. I researched coop designs and dimension requirements, my husband
designed and built it, and the kids measured, hammered and played inside to see
how the chickens would live once it was finished.
Only a few months earlier, our older daughter had declared the
weather studies in her first grade homeschool curriculum package to be too
boring, so we dropped it to pursue science topics more in line with her
interests. However, when we started observing weather on a daily basis as part
of preparing for our chicks’ big move to the coop outside, she became fascinated
with the subject. She checked the thermometer and watched the clouds. She
noticed when the grass was no longer frosty in the mornings and other signs that
the nights were warm enough for our chicks and their heat lamp to move outside
and out of our kitchen-turned-barn.
April slid into May with the girls’ birthdays and a slow, gray,
rainy start to Spring. For a few hours a day whenever it wasn’t raining, the
chicks enjoyed time on the lawn in their custom playpen. The baby gate sections
from the brooder were turned into a long, covered, bottomless pen so that the
chicks could enjoy the grass and bugs without the danger of being eaten by hawks
or other animals. Soon, the chicks grew out of the limited space of their
playpen and complained loudly in protest at being “cooped up.” They were ready
to explore more of the lawn than a relatively small section at a time, yet still
too young to be turned loose in our large yard with pet dogs and cats.
Thus began many discussions with the children about prey-predator
relationships, dog packs versus chicken flocks and how we can use that knowledge
to teach the dogs to protect the chickens instead of hunt them.
Thus began many discussions with the children about
prey-predator relationships, dog packs versus chicken flocks and how we can use
that knowledge to teach the dogs to protect the chickens instead of hunt them. A
friend who was experienced in raising chickens gave us some techniques for
teaching the dogs that the chickens outranked them in the family pack and we
used them with great success.
The relationship between chickens and cats required no
intervention from us. Our aging cats took one look at these nearly full-size
birds with beaks and claws to match and ran as fast as they could in the
opposite direction. We felt a bit sorry for the cat who woke from an afternoon
nap and found himself face to face with something that must have seemed like a
velociraptor coming at him – a bird his own size. The dogs weren’t too happy
with their new lowly status, but we watched the three species sort out the
relationships into a peaceful sharing of space.
Meanwhile, as the chickens kept growing, their coop needed to be
cleaned with increasing frequency and volume of fresh wood shavings. We talked
about possible uses for the shavings from the coop and soon realized that
starting a large compost bin would be an ideal solution for our household. The
children learned about decomposition, bacteria and the cycles of life and
nutrients in the environment.
Layering each week’s clean-out from the coop with kitchen scraps
and dirt created a beautiful substance, clean and earthy, which was teeming with
interesting bugs for the girls to see up close with a magnifying glass. Each
week, we’d scoop out a shovelful of brewing compost from the bin to the grass,
lay on our bellies and count all the different kinds of bugs and try to identify
the “ingredients.” The pile grew and grew until we needed to have another
conversation about what to do with all the compost. “Start a garden!” The girls
cheered as they jumped up and down with excitement about their idea.
The baby gate sections, abandoned in the side yard since the
chicks outgrew the playpen configuration, now had a new purpose: Instead of keeping the
chickens in, they would now link together to keep the chickens out of the new
garden patch with its tender seedlings. The chickens were more than happy to
stay out of the new small garden as they were now free to roam the backyard
during the daylight hours. Each morning, they hopped down from their perches in
the top of the coop, walked down the ramp to the lower section, straight past
the feeder and chicken water and out the door to explore the yard. We watched
them learn to drink from the dog water, to dust bathe under the large flowering
shrubs where the hawks couldn’t see them and to hunt bugs in the lawn.
Have you ever followed a chicken as it lives freely? Science class became an
adventure in the yard, following a chicken and discovering what it did all day
long. Summer arrived and provided long, warm days for observing our flock of
omnivores. The girls crawled under the shrubs and into the dust bath wallows,
feeling the cool dirt on their skin and in their hair. They sat on the lawn and
watched the chickens graze on clover leaves and grass seeds, catch worms after a
summer rain and race around the yard to keep the other chickens from stealing
their catch, and listen to the new clucks coming from grown chickens who used to
make peeps. The kids sneaked chickens into the house, even into the bedrooms,
for snuggling in great piles of blanket nests.
Two of the hens laid their first eggs on the first day in August.
One was a tiny, perfect powder blue egg smaller than a golf ball.
Two of the hens laid their first eggs on the first day in August. One was a
tiny, perfect powder blue egg smaller than a golf ball. The other was bigger,
but lacked a hard shell. This was an amazing discovery and prompted many
questions, most of which started with “Why…” and needed an immediate answer.
Often, a young hen doesn’t have enough calcium stored up for the first egg’s
shell, so it comes out soft and rubbery. This was a tangible way the children
could understand an important concept of nutrition: A body needs enough
nutrients to do its job. As the hen showed more interest in the ground oyster
shell that was offered free-choice in the coop, she was able to consume the
calcium she needed to lay all subsequent eggs with perfect green shells. Then
the girls wanted to know what other nutrients were in eggs, so we looked up
information on the nutritional profile of eggs and launched into comparing our
eggs with store-bought eggs.
At first sight of what was inside of our chickens’ eggs, our younger daughter
ran screaming from the kitchen and refused to come out of the bedroom. She had
never seen eggs with yolks the same color as her orange marker and was deeply
suspicious of what could make it that color. She wouldn’t taste it (tasted the
same), refused to let it contaminate her plate of pale yellow scrambled eggs
(store-bought, as she was used to), but did enjoy smashing eggs with a whisk in
a bowl in preparation for cooking. Gradually, over the course of a few weeks,
she started to believe me that the green grass made the orange yolks and
consented to try them after seeing her older sister’s delight in eating “our”
eggs. After a while, she felt that the store eggs were just too plain compared
to the daily Easter eggs from the coop, for the three hens were gifting us with
four eggs every other day in shells painted with powder blue, pastel teal and
pale olive green.
As summer faded to autumn, our thoughts settled on what we had lived and
learned. The kids will happily tell anyone how to raise newly hatched chicks,
build a coop and figure out how many eggs the hens will lay in a week. They know
why weather matters to the plants and animals, how compost makes a garden grow
and how living things are connected. These seasons of learning were an
unparalleled experience. What shall we do next winter? Perhaps we will find
something new to live and explore or continue with the theme of chickens. The
children would like to watch one of our hens to raise a brood of chicks next
spring and, since the fourth chicken is a handsome rooster, we just might do
that.
Learn More
www.mypetchicken.com
www.backyardchickens.com
www.organicchickens.homestead.com
www.urbanchickens.org
www.urbanchickens.net
www.poultry.allotment.org.uk
Backyard Poultry magazineChickens In Your Backyard: A Beginner’s Guide by Rick Luttmann and
Gail Luttmann (Rodale Books, 1976
Keep Chickens! Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs, and Other Small
Spaces by Barbara Kilarski (Storey Publishing, 2003)
Keeping Chickens: The Essential Guide by Jeremy Hobson and Celia
Lewis (David & Charles, 2007)
Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens by Gail Damerow (Storey
Publishing, 1995)
Chickens in the Permaculture Garden by Jeff Johnston, Natural Life
magazine, May/June 1998 issue
Sarah Miner lives in the glorious Pacific Northwest with her
husband and best friend Jim and their two daughters Ashley-Rose (7) and Carina
(3).
A Chicken in Every Backyard?
by Wendy Priesnitz, Editor
The
idea of keeping chickens in your backyard is taking flight. It’s prompted by
concerns about food and financial sustainability, and by people who want to
connect with the source of their food. Chickens also eat bugs and help with your
organic garden by producing manure and “cutting” the grass (although, if you’re
not careful, they may eat your organic garden too!). And, then, they’re a great
source of antibiotic-free fresh eggs.
If you live in the country, there’s no problem beyond developing the required
knowledge, but urban residents will need to check with their city bylaws to see
if it’s legal. In many countries, including Europe, municipal officials have
never outlawed chicken coops and people are much more in tune with their food
sources and with Nature than we are in North America.
An estimated 300 North American cities allow a few backyard chickens (seldom
a rooster though). New York City; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles; Seattle;
Houston; Chicago; Victoria, British Columbia (and more than a dozen other B.C.
municipalities); London, Ontario; and Niagara Falls, Ontario allow backyard
poultry. And in other areas, chickavores have been pecking away at local bylaws.
In Toronto, for instance, an online petition (www.torontochickens.com)
aims to persuade City Council to make backyard chickens legal there.
In some areas – most recently, Halifax, Nova Scotia – opposition is vocal and
based on the potential for noise and smells, concerns about rats and raccoons
being attracted to chicken coops, and worries about health risks from disease.
If you keep your henhouse super-clean, smells and rodents shouldn’t be a
problem. Nor is bird flu a big threat. It thrives in a wet environment such as a
manure-saturated, densely packed factory farm setting. Because of their robust
immune systems and exposure to sunlight, backyard chickens are far less likely
to become infected and spread avian flu. Salmonella bacteria can be a threat,
but can be controlled by washing your hands after handling chickens, and
disinfecting any chicken-induced scratches your children might get.
So, the times-they are a-changin’ and this is a good time to do a little
local chicken activism. Researchers with the American Planning Association say
that in the past six months they’ve fielded more questions about livestock
ordinances than almost any other topic.
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