Hen House

By Katie Burford

Ever since we got chickens, I’ve been looking at my dog in a whole different way. Sure, she’s sweet and has been a faithful companion for nearly 14 years, but has she ever provided me breakfast? Or guarded my garden against loathsome leaf-eating, disease-carrying insects? Or generated high-quality compost while recycling my table scraps? (She would devour the scraps, but at her advanced age, those have been off her diet for decades in dog years.)

While I reckon we’ll keep her (she does clean up every particle of food dropped by my two-year-old), chickens, I think, are rising up to challenge canines for the title of “Man’s Best Friend.” Everything I learn makes me wonder how we ever lived without them.

There are so many fascinating facets to chickens—I’m learning more every day—that I have no idea where to start an article about them. So I’ll start with No. 1, noting for our dear readers that these facts have no particular relevance or relation, other than being interesting and about my latest favorite topic.

1. Durango City Council “legalized” chickens in the city limits in November 2009, almost a year after Councilor Michael Rendon first raised the issue. In a recent interview, Rendon said he was motivated to fight for backyard chickens out of a belief in local food, but wasn’t sure if the idea wouldn’t lay an egg (sorry—my one and only chicken pun).
   “I didn’t know if the city was ready for it,” he said.
   The ordinance passed 3 – 2 with Councilors Leigh Meigs and Doug Lyon voting against it out of concern about noise, smell, and predators.
   In Rendon’s opinion, coexisting with chickens is a return to the natural order of things.
   “A lot of the world lives like that,” he said.
   While he doesn’t currently have chickens, he said he plans to get some.
2. City dwellers are allowed to keep up to six hens, but no roosters.
3. A little-known (or frequently ignored) fact about the ordinance is that it requires chicken owners to get a $20 permit. As of the end of April, the city had issued only four permits. Meanwhile, Basin Co-op, the old-school farm supply operation across the highway from Walmart, has sold some 500 chicks so far this spring—about the number they sold in all of last year, according to cashier Leslie Loveday.
4. I admit our chicks are undocumented.
5. In 2007, Mother Earth News tested the nutritional quality of eggs laid by hens raised on pasture versus those raised commercially in cages. They found the eggs from the free-range hens had a third less cholesterol, a quarter less saturated fat, two-thirds more vitamin A, twice as many omega-3 fatty acids, three times more vitamin E, and seven times more beta carotene.
6. Studies published in the journal Science in 2007 linked tissue taken from modern-day chickens to that extracted from the 68-million-year-old leg bone of a T. Rex. In essence, this makes chickens the closest living ancestor to the fearsome Cretaceousperiod theropod. When you look at their gnarly scaled legs and eerily prehensile claws, it’s not hard to imagine.
7. Domestic chickens, Gallus gallus domesticus, are believed to have first emerged in southwest Asia about 8,000 years ago.
8. Chickens are omnivores. On the range, they pass their days bobbing for seeds, greens, worms, bugs, and even small rodents or lizards. They adore dirt, which they bathe in and eat as a digestive aid (chickens have no teeth), according to Dean Mullen, who teaches a class on backyard chickens for Fort Lewis College Continuing Education.
9. Mullen, who has kept chickens in the city for years, said he escaped enforcement action by successfully arguing they were household pets and not livestock. “I got them off my back when it was supposedly illegal to have chickens,” he told his chicken class.
10. There are countless breeds of chickens that vary on a host of characteristics, such as size, egg production, egg color, capacity to withstand cold, temperament and broodiness, which describes a hen’s tendency to sit on her eggs once they are laid.
11. One popular breed, the Araucana, lays lovely powder-blue eggs and traces its roots back to Chile in South America. Some have suggested that the Araucana is descended from chickens brought over the Pacific Ocean from Southeast Asia, thereby proving transport between the continents before Columbus arrived.
12. In addition to the Araucana, breeds that do well in our climes, according to Mullen, include the Rhode Island Red, Ameraucana, Barred Rock, Buff Orpington, Wyandotte, California White and Leghorn.
13. White Leghorns, which originated in Italy, are generally considered the most productive breed, laying around 300 eggs a year. Unfortunately, breeding for that trait has also boosted the birds’ territorial instincts, making them prone to brutal aggression against other chickens, according to a recent Associated Press article. This, apparently, can be problematic in commercial operations, where their beaks are sometimes trimmed to avoid bloodshed, but we’re hoping not in backyards, because we have one White Leghorn.
14. The New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean, in an essay titled “The It Bird,” credits homemaking guru Martha Stewart with helping to make chicken-keeping fashionable again.
15. “In 1982, Martha Stewart published her first book, Entertaining, which featured her flock of rare-breed chickens and their pretty pastel-colored eggs,” Orlean wrote. “For the previous forty years or so, chicken farming had been viewed as a lowly profession ... they were almost more plant than animal, but animal-messy and smelly and sentient ... She made chickens seem less like livestock and more like useful and companionable creatures.”
16. As I write this, my husband is out in unseasonably cold weather building a coop/chicken run. Let me tell you, those chicks don’t stay small and fluffy for long.
17. If you get chicks and have children in your neighborhood, you will become very popular.
18. I have a signed copy of City Chicks: Keeping Micro-flocks of Laying Hens as Garden Helpers, Compost Makers, Bio-recyclers, and Local Food Suppliers, by Patricia Foreman. Definitely an invaluable resource. Her inscription says, “May the flock be with you!”
19. I thought about including a “why did the chicken cross the road?” joke but couldn’t find one that was funny. Not even remotely.
20. Mullen said he has lost more chickens to neighborhood dogs than wild predators like raccoons, hawks, skunks or mountain lions.
21. A decrease in sunlight, not cold, is responsible for hens’ tendency to lay fewer eggs in the winter. City Chicks author Foreman recommends using artificial light in the evenings or early mornings to boost off-season production.
22. Chickens can’t fly per se, but can achieve enough height to hop a fence or get into a tree to roost. To avoid escapes, owners often clip their wings.
23. Chickens have one all-purpose, back-end orifice. It’s called a vent.
24. A PBS special called “The Natural History of the Chicken” reports that there are 250 million egg-producing hens in the United States. The hour-long show includes an interview with a daffy lady who diapers her Japanese Silkie bantam rooster, “Cotton,” and takes it everywhere like Paris Hilton and her chihuahua Tinkerbell. The show also tells the story of a rooster back in the forties from Fruita, Colorado, that lived without a head long enough to become an international sensation.
25. Since we’re vegetarians, the question of what to do with the chickens when they die or stop laying is a tricky one. My husband is willing to kill and eat them as a cycle-of-life lesson for our children. I’ll stick with tofu.
26. Chickens rule!

RESOURCES:

Durango City Clerk’s Office: (970) 375-5010 or www.durangogov.org. See Ordinance 0-2009-23, Chapter 27, Article 10-1-30 of the city code, posted online, for details about the chicken ordinance.

Basin Co-op, 26103 Highway 160 East, (970) 247-3066

Mesa Market and Feed, 123 Highway 172, (970) 247-4933

Backyard Chickens, www.backyardchickens.com