Awkward chicken transition

Whatever I write about next is going to seem trivial, so I'm just gonna dive in. It's an uncomfortable segue from cancer to poultry, but here goes:

We got chickens. Real, live, peeping, baby chickens. 4 of them.

They look just like this:


Tina, do not freak out! You'll never have to see them - you weren't really ever going to come down for a visit anyway, were you?

I decided to start a little, backyard laying flock. Even though this is something that never EVEN entered my mind prior to about 6 months ago, apparently it's not that uncommon for people to have urban, backyard flocks. You might think there's some local ordinance against it in your town or city, but probably not. Not for a few hens anyway. Roosters are another story - lots of towns ban them because they drive the neighbors crazy with the crowing - but a few hens is pretty low-impact, from a neighbor perspective.

I started thinking about it because when we lived in Kansas our friends, Dick and Cathy, kept chickens. They're a retired couple who live on about 25 acres outside of Lawrence, and they keep a pretty big flock, for amateurs anyway, of about 20 birds I'd guess, including a couple of roosters. Cathy's into heirloom breeds, so they have lots of different kinds of chickens. One of the perqs of being their friends is that they would give us eggs all the time; a dozen eggs a week for years. Those were some good eggs. I'm not kidding. If you've never had really fresh eggs from healthy, happy chickens, do yourself a favor and find some.

I've told Dick and Cathy a couple of times that if Linus turns out to be a genius we owe it to them. They kept me in high quality protein throughout my entire pregnancy and through Linus' first year AND eggs are a good source of choline, which is key in brain development. The whole time I was pregnant an omelet sounded tasty, while many other foods were Off The List, so I ate a lot of eggs. There was a front page article in the New York Times last Sunday all about how we're living longer and healthier lives than our ancestors, in part because we have better pre-natal and early childhood nutrition. So, Linus will also have to thank Dick and Cathy if he lives a long time.

Anyway, I've been missing those good eggs and I started looking into what it would take to raise laying hens. Turns out, not much. I may have mentioned this before, but I am a total geek. I'm all about data, so when I approach something new like this my first response is to gather as much information as possible. I spent weeks reading every website and book about raising chickens I could get my hands on. I now know pretty much everything you can know about raising chickens from reading a book. I could write a thesis. Of course, I'd end up plagiarizing all over the place because I have no ACTUAL experience, but none-the-less, I'd get an "A".

Once we decided to give it a try, I had to figure out where to get the chicks. Turns out, you can get them mailed to you. Seriously. No big deal. A peeping box with holes in it will be delivered to your front door by your regular mail carrier. Who knew? There are a number of hatcheries around that have just about any breed of chicken you might want. I decided on Barred Plymouth Rocks. They're supposed to be good layers and calm, not flighty, important because I don't want any chickens flapping around my head, and pretty nice looking.

You know...for a chicken.


The problem with ordering through the mail is that the hatchery will decide how many chicks are needed to keep each other warm and even if you just want four pullets (girl chicks), they'll pack in as many extra cockerels (boy chicks) as they deem necessary. Of course, they have way more boys than they need because chicken sex-ratios are just like ours, 50/50, so using them as packing peanuts is no loss to them. So, it's possible that I'd have 15 chicks show up on my doorstep. I wanted to avoid this if possible, so I found a hatchery not too far from here where I could go pick them up. I'll write all about how I'm never patronizing that hatchery again in another post, but for now I'll just say that I went up there yesterday and picked up my chicks. They're living in an old fishtank for the next month or so until they're big enough to move outside. Orion's building the outside accommodations for them. If they all make it through puberty, in about 5 months we should be getting a dozen or so eggs a week from them.

The irony is, I don't like birds. I'm with Tina on this one, though maybe not quite as borderline-phobic. I've never kept birds of any kind. I'm not much of a bird watcher. I have a bird feeder in my yard, and I'll occasionally look up a visiting bird in an old, hand-me-down bird guide, but mostly I'll watch the robins working the yard through the blinds with slitty eyes. I don't trust those robins. You can totally see their dinosaur ancestry in the way they move. Creepy. I don't feed the ducks or geese at the local pond, uh uh, no way. I never saw the penguin documentary. Never will. Penguins freak me out. But somehow this seems do-able. They are pretty cute when they're small, so maybe watching them grow up will make them more familiar; not so alien and disturbing.

I don't know, we'll see. If it doesn't work out I'm sure they'll make a fine stew, so either way...