The Urban Permaculture Farm Magazine

Mary Bon

The first weekend in August is among the most crowded of times on what is known locally as the Shoreline, the central coast of southern Connecticut.  Almost everyone on our side of the Mennunketesuck River, across from bustling Pilot’s Point Marina, was outside entertaining and barbecuing.  From two-doors down, the homeowner’s daughter visiting from Oklahoma arrived on our patio with a platter of delicious desserts.

“I just wanted to tell you how much we’ve enjoyed your roosters,” she said.  “I made way too much.  I hope you can eat this,” she continued, handing me a heavy foil covered paper plate.

But she had me at roosters.  Sure, Pancho was a strapping lad, but roosters plural?  Rose did try to crow now and again, but to no avail.

“All five of them are roosters,” her Oklahoma accent lending a definite air of authority to her statement.  “They were really fun to have around.”

A few days later she asked if I had reconciled myself to having all boys, but I still wasn’t convinced.  Hens do crow, some say.  And, the white leghorn hens pictured on the internet have big crowns like their male counterparts.  Still, I had adopted them from a local high school biology department’s annual chick hatching, so they hadn’t been professionally sexed.  But what were the chances of five out of five being roosters?

Turns out to have been a moot point.  Within days I learned someone from up the street had complained and I was out of compliance with town zoning ordinances; “high density residential … does not permit the housing of fowl and farm animals … and that additional concerns … related to unsanitary conditions resulting from the droppings and the noise created by farm birds.”

During the summer my neighborhood is definitely crowded.  April brings the tradesmen and the do-it-yourselfers with their power tools; there is often pile driving along the river.  Apparently no one uses a rake anymore even though a gas-powered leaf blower is definitely over kill on such small lots.  The marina starts to run the crane and launch the boats that have been on the hard all winter.  It sounds like an industrial area, but it’s beautiful and the noise is part of the price for the beauty.

Then May brings car alarms and barking dogs along with the early summer people.  Traffic zooms down my one-lane, one-way street.  Live music drifts in from local venues.  Firecrackers, jet skis, lobster boats heading out at dawn, all the sounds of summer.

But from September until spring, my neighborhood is an oasis of peace and solitude.  The population drops by more than half.  I often have the beach to stroll by myself.  Certainly if the area’s census were taken in February it would probably be one of the town’s least densely populated zones.

My five roosters were housed inside.  I brought the chicks home in an old Easter basket and they spent ten days in a homemade brooder, which morphed over the next couple of weeks in to a roost.  When they were able to spend time outside without a heat source, I built small pens for them from bamboo stakes and plastic vine netting.  It was soon apparent that they saw me as the Foghorn of the bunch, so I let them roam about, confident they would flock near me.  Despite baby chicks being a near perfect cat toy – squeaky, fluffy, ambulatory and, I’m guessing, yummy – my two cats soon grew protective of them and took on a role more suited to border collies.

My neighbor adjacent to the south assured me she enjoyed them and welcomed them in her yard.  They glowed bright white in the sunshine with handsome red combs and gleaming gold eyes. Curious by nature, they would sometimes collectively break in to a run as though they had to be somewhere in a hurry.  At times they were entertaining to the point of distraction, and I found myself whiling away more time than I had to spare watching the chicken channel.

I secured my property along the northern border and they quickly learned not to stray in that direction.  All five stuck together during the day, visiting a couple of favored shady spots, eating bugs and enjoying their freedom, always seeking out my company whenever I was in the yard.  The most remarkable thing about them was how easy it was to care for them.  My southern neighbor once noted they were better trained than her dog.  You would get no argument from me on that point.

They returned to the hen house on their own around 7 PM.  This was the only time they would willingly let me pick them up and pet them.  All of them enjoyed the attention, and two sought it out.  They slept safe from predators behind a metal door in a built-in gardening shed underneath the patio.  Farmer’s hours came naturally to me, and by 6:30 AM they were scratching away under the newly filled birdfeeder in my backyard.   Occasionally Pancho crowed; toward the end José (nee Rose) was trying to imitate him.

It was a brilliant summer for gardening, and since my boat was undergoing maintenance, I spent a lot of time in the backyard with the chickens.  Occasionally I fretted about their gender.  They were meant to be layers.  White leghorns are the factory egg layers for the majority of commercial egg producers in the US.  They are so specialized that chicken farmers no longer have to worry about leghorn hens going broody, i.e.  trying to hatch their eggs.  But despite their industrial origins -- science experiments for high school students, to boot – my flock was charmingly good company.  Our house was filled with visitors all summer and everyone got a kick out of the chickens, as did the neighborhood kids who regularly congregate here.  To watch the joy my chickens got out of dust baths (I thought pigs were supposed to be happy in dirt!) made me sad for their industrialized counterparts with clipped beaks and cages too small to turn around in.

Yes they pooped.  But they spent most of their time in one of three places: the roost in the henhouse/tool shed; in the shady thicket of Jerusalem artichokes alongside my house; or under a large thimbleberry bush at the edge of the marsh.  The roost was lined with yard clippings that I transferred into my covered compost bin every few days.  Since I still used the henhouse as a tool shed I kept the area scrupulously clean, regularly hosing down the concrete floor and the structure they slept on.  The vast majority of their droppings were collected in the clippings.

If unsanitary conditions are really a concern, I would advocate against the almost daily cleaning of fish and shellfish into the river from a neighboring dock.  While it may attract crabs to the many traps they leave set all summer, it also attracts flies, gulls and other scavengers, and is generally unpleasant at low tide.   Even the marina prohibits dumping fish guts in to the river.

The flock instinctively knew it was safest from birds of prey in my backyard under the shade of a huge old oak tree, a veritable bee paradise thick with clover, bordered by fruit trees and vegetable gardens. Like a herd of wee goats, they were terrific at keeping the hard-to-trim areas around my raised beds tidy and weed-free.  Chickens are also known for their tick hunting prowess.  Since I control the phragmites on the edge of the marsh by hand – it should be outlawed to use herbicides in such an environmentally sensitive area – knowing the tick population was under siege made that labor-intensive chore less odious.

I’m certain my flock helped keep mosquitoes and other pests under control as well, a necessity in light of last year’s tragic and inexplicable bat die-off in New England.  While all five were friendly toward people, they were fierce predators.  One caught and ate a crab.  They demolished the remains of any rodents the cats left lying about.  I was relieved to catch our errant pet King snake before she made it to the back yard.

The five roosters also liked to climb the steps to the patio outside the kitchen door.  Chickens really are delightfully social creatures, and they made themselves at home there in the sun with the cats.  That was where they spent their last day.

I live on a waterway whose delta is bordered by two rookeries, Mennunketesuck Island and Duck Island. Birds migrate overhead year around.  Trumpeter swans and Canada geese, loons, grebes, mallards, buffleheads, mergansers, coots, ibises, egrets, cormorants, herons.  The local osprey population is healthy, and I watched the chickens learn to discern from which raptors they had to hide.  The seagulls are a constant presence.  Then there are the birds drawn to the feeders: crows, blackbirds, jays, cardinals, doves, sparrows, finches, and the noisiest bird ever- starlings.  If one is not fond of bird sounds, this in no place to live.

The roosters weren’t outside until I let them out in the morning.  First, I would wake to the sounds of the river, the marina, the wildlife.  And the little flock was nowhere near as noisy as any of the dogs that summer in my neighborhood (there is one barking as I type) despite my unwittingly ending up with five roosters.  My intention was three hens.  I told my kids from the beginning, any roosters were going to be named Stew.

So I would not have kept this flock anyway, no hens no eggs.   But they opened my eyes to the benefits of backyard chickens, even without the eggs.  Compared to most chickens these five lived in paradise for their short lives.  Their deaths were not scary; I know, I did it myself.  And nothing went to waste.  A young cockerel – boy chicken -- is as delicious as any pullet.

I butchered them the week after the girl from Oklahoma stopped by with the plate of desserts.  The next day, the news broke of salmonella contaminating of half-a-billion-with-a-B of our nation’s eggs.

I know there are some who do not think chickens fit in to the neighborhood aesthetic.  One local resident doesn’t approve of backyard chickens any more than he does of a neighbor who grows vegetables in the front of his house.  Someone once noted that my clothesline was “quaint.”  But there was a time when chickens were the norm and not the exception.  Dryers were a luxury. Everyone had a kitchen garden.  And odds were good that breakfast wouldn’t send you to the hospital.

No one will ever mistake my patch of earth for a putting green, but I will never understand why anyone would have a life-sized plastic egret in their back yard while poisoning the real thing with toxic lawn products.  In the decade I have lived here I’ve watched while the neighborhood gets more landscaped, more paved and more of the weathered wood shingles and porches replaced with petroleum-based vinyl products.  It is a way of life that is unsustainable as more people are starting to realize.

From San Francisco to New York City – areas with much higher population densities – people are incorporating chickens in to their lives for reasons ranging from meat to companionship.  With increasing concerns about industrialized farming practices and our food’s carbon footprint, local production makes a lot of sense.  It doesn’t get more local than one’s own backyard.