It is the Year of the Chicken. Whether prompted by a practical attraction to the daily fresh eggs or by a fanciful desire to import a little bit of country charm in our urban lives, over the past two years city and suburban households have adopted more chickens than ever. Seattle. Portland. Los Angeles. New York. City chickens are hatching in urban areas at break-egg speed.
Why the sudden population boom in town and country chickens? Perhaps because chickens hearken back to simpler times when most American households included chickens. A time when most of our daily foods were brought in from the backyard, not shipped over thousands of miles and dozens of days to our dinner plates. Keeping chickens gives people a chance to slow down and smell the flowers — flowers that grow larger and brighter each year when composted with homegrown chicken poop.
Chickens have awakened the carpenters and craftsmen apparently latent in modern civilization. City chickens don’t live in scrap wood shacks; they live in palatial hen habitats and estates built especially for them. Farmer wanna-bes in urban neighborhoods are investing considerable time and money in coop design and architecture. Maybe you can’t afford to custom build a Swiss chalet or log cabin–style home for your family, but you can build one for your chickens instead!
Raising chickens satisfies an intrinsic and basic human right to feed oneself. A right to grow some or all of your own food. Though my own hens are family pets, my family now depends on their eggs, which are a luscious addition to the vegetables and herbs grown nearly year-round in my kitchen garden. My partial self-sufficiency is a source of personal pride and an inspiration to my friends and family. My urban chickens are a symbol of my commitment to be more self-reliant. Though I still shop at the grocery store, I now try to feed my family more from the backyard than the supermarket. Don’t crack up; I feel empowered by “growing” my own eggs. So do many fellow chicken keepers.
I’ve lived in big cities and busy suburbs all my life. If I’d known all along that keeping a few hens in my backyard was not only legal but also fun and inspiring, I would have had chickens long ago. Now that I do know, I’ll never be henless again.
This book’s instructions for starting and maintaining a flock are distilled from my experience in raising hens in the city. They will also hold true for those of you who live in the suburbs, in small towns, or out in the country. If you worry that you’ll be the oddball chicken keeper on your block, rest assured that there are more chicken enthusiasts out there than you know. If articles that appeared over the last year in House & Garden and the Wall Street Journal are any indication of chickens’ rising popularity in urban neighborhoods, then the Power of Fowl is being realized. Forget the phoenix — chickens are rising!