Urban Chicken Ownership?

[Shadowex3]

First let me get something out of the way: "Clucking Retarded"...

Alright now that I've got that out of my system I find myself shocked at the idea that this might actually work. And not just in "urban" areas where you've got a LOT of space between you and your neighbors but even here in Central Florida suburbs. It's possible to get hens that will lay roughly 5-7 eggs a week, two of those would easily be enough to keep me supplied and then after that tapers off there's... other nutritional considerations.

I don't think it would be too hard to make a decent coop that would be easy to clean up and keep the noise down, assuming hens are even particularly noisy. You could probably start with an ordinary toolshed and just insulate it and stick some lights and vinyl tiling down or similar along with an inexpensive window unit that would circulate fresh air in... I mean after all they raise chickens in the middle east.

The real question here is why there seems to be such irrational dislike of the idea. It's perfectly possible for one person to keep two or three chickens hygenically and disease is unlikely to be an issue any more than it would with a pet. Would you guys go for it if you had the space?

[Charlatan]

I know that Lurkette, Ratbastid and Stella Luna raise chickens in their backyard and it makes me wish I could too. Where I live right now, I can't do it (it's a condo) but at my old house in Toronto, I would have considered installing a small pen in the backyard so I could have some eggs and maybe a roaster or two.

If I ever move back to Toronto, I would seriously consider moving somewhere I could raise some meat and eggs.

[jewels]

I don't see why not. Be sure to check your local ordinances. Municipalities differ on their zoning laws and may require licensing if they allow it. Depending how far your neighbors are, they might have to agree that they don't mind their day beginning with a bit of crowing.

[Shadowex3]

I thought only rooster crowed and if you stuck with straight hens or just put them somewhere relatively soundproofed it wouldn't be an issue...

[The_Dunedan]

Lots of cityfolk are very uneasy when confronted with "Where Your Food Comes From." They'll routinely bitch about the smell (nonexistent) the noise (from hens, nonexistent) the alleged health hazards (with special attention paid to their paralytic horror of Avian Influenza), and any other thing they can think of. Plus with the recent passage of SB-510, you may find yourself afowl of the Feds as well. And that's not counting the snoopy animal-rights loons, busybody neighbors, and general ignoramii one encounters in cities everywhere.

Other than that, I say GO FOR IT. Food independence is a precious and fast-disappearing thing, and I -promise- you, once you taste and bake with real, hot-from-the-nest eggs (as opposed to store-bought which have been cold-stored for as much as two YEARS before sale), you will never EVER go back. Yolks as bright as road-signs, whites so think you understand why they used to make glue out of 'em, and flavour that has to be tasted to be believed. Go for it.

TheCityChicken.com is an -awesome- resource for urbanites wanting to raise their own fowl for meat or eggs: lots of great idea for chicken coops and "tractors*", articles on the legal hassles, you name it.

For one person's egg needs, 2-3 dual-purpose birds (we like Buff Orpingtons) will more than suit. Our little Banty Cochin hens have also been wonderful producers, and being only about 1/2 the size of an Orpington they eat a lot less and take up less space while still producing plenty of eggs. 3-4 Banty Cochins or a similar breed should do you just fine, plus they've got lots of personality (for a chicken, anyway). If you can let them wander, a few chickens of almost any breed will happily weed, de-bug, and fertilise your lawn (plus provide lots of entertainment being...well...bird-brained). The only downside is that their digging and scratching for bugs and worms can quickly denude a small patch of ground. If you've ever seen what a small chicken-run looks like, you'll know what I mean.

*A mobile chicken-coop with a wire mesh floor. You move it to a different location in your yard every day, which the chickens then de-bug and fertilize. You get most of the benefits of free-range chickens with few of the headaches, plus excellent protection from predators.

[jewels]

My mistake. Missed the part where you want to stick with the two hens.

[spindles]

We know a few people close by that have hens and my wife is keen. I think it is just one more thing to look after, though I'll probably give in eventually.

[snowy]

I really, really want chickens. I definitely have enough space for chickens. We have cats, though. I'm not sure how that would work. My husband is adamantly opposed, largely due to the cat issue. Help?


I did an imprinting project with a chick in high school. I've had a love affair with chickens ever since. I babysit for some people with chickens, and I really enjoy going over there and getting to hold and pet the chickens.

[Baraka_Guru]

If I were to own chickens, they'd be pets.

[Shadowex3]

Delicious pets.

[Baraka_Guru]

I often call my cat delicious.

[Shadowex3]

Ah but what does cat taste like Baraka...

[snowy]

My grandpa said it was like most generic meat--like chicken!

[RogueGypsy]

Originally Posted by snowy

I really, really want chickens. I definitely have enough space for chickens. We have cats, though. I'm not sure how that would work. My husband is adamantly opposed, largely due to the cat issue. Help?

You may have to protect the chickens as chicks, depends on how aggressively your cats hunt. But once the chickens are adults, the cats will leave them alone after the first encounter. Chickens can peck and claw enough to discourage most household pets. But like I said, it depends on the cat.

I have 2 cats, our neighbor has several chickens along with a mess of other fowl (turkeys, pheasants, ducks, geese..........). She let them roam the neighborhood for a couple of years with no problems. It was great for me, every morning and every evening a parade of fowl would march through my yard eating every slug and bug in sight. One of our neighbors must have complained, likely about the goose poo, so she keeps them penned now. My cats were curious about them, but if they got too close a wing flap or a peck sent the cats running.

If you think it would be a concern with cats, get 1 turkey. Nothing in its right mind will mess with a turkey. The turkey will quickly become the leader, defending the flock and the chickens will follow it everywhere. Then you'll have eggs every day and the best turkey you've ever had on T-Day.

I should add, Geese work as well as Turkeys as guard fowl, but they are much more aggressive and noisy.
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[Fremen]

My brother and I raised chickens in high school for Ag class, and it taught us a valuable lesson in being prepared.

We ordered the baby chicks from Sears and it was supposed to be 4-6 weeks delivery, but they came way too early.

We had made a deal with our neighbor to build us a coop with heat lamps if we painted his garage.
Well we did our part, but he was slower in doing his part.
Most of our chicks died from the cold before we could get it set up.
We ordered more chicks, and had more trouble when this batch reached adult-hood.
We didn't have enough space for the amount of chickens we had and a bunch suffocated trying to crowd into the confined space getting away from the freezing rain.
And the smell from the chicken shit? God awful!

So my advice is, be prepared, don't buy more chickens for the space, and clean that shit up regularly.

Good luck, because, while in a way... it was nasty, it was still kind of a fun time.

[spindles]

Originally Posted by snowy

I really, really want chickens. I definitely have enough space for chickens. We have cats, though. I'm not sure how that would work. My husband is adamantly opposed, largely due to the cat issue. Help?

We have cats, too. I think chickens *might* be a bit big for the cats to mess with, though I guess I won't know until it happens.

[Hektore]

The borough I live in explicitly prohibit the ownership of fowl within the borough limits, even a single bird is disallowed. Definitely check your local ordinances first.

Also, coops smell, I don't care what anyone says. You eventually get used to it, but your neighbors may not want to. Also, being in regular contact with fowl does increase your risk for influenza (not just the particular Flu of the Week that the news wants you to believe will kill us all).

However, I have my sincere doubts the risk would prevent me from doing it, as it's relatively small. I say go for it as long as it's legal.

[snowy]

How about beekeeping? I came across this article in the NYTimes today, and it put me in mind of the chicken thread.

The Beekeeper Next Door
By KRISTINA SHEVORY

MIKE BARRETT does not have much of a yard at his two-story row house in Astoria, Queens. But that fact has not kept him from his new hobby of beekeeping — he put the hive on his roof. When it was harvest time this fall, he just tied ropes around each of the two honey-filled boxes in the hive, and lowered them to the ground.

Eventually, Mr. Barrett loaded the boxes into his car, took off his white beekeeper suit and set off for a commercial kitchen in Brooklyn. There, along with other members of the New York City beekeeping club, he extracted his honey, eventually lugging home 40 pounds of the stuff.   click to show 

He was happy with his successful harvest, but he also reaped something he did not expect. “I was surprised how much I really care about the bees,” said Mr. Barrett, 49, a systems administrator for New York University, in reflecting on his inaugural season as a beekeeper. “You start to think about the ways to make their lives better.”

Until last spring, Mr. Barrett would have been breaking the law and risking a $2,000 fine for engaging in his sticky new hobby. But in March, New York City made beekeeping legal, and in so doing it joined a long list of other municipalities, from Denver to Milwaukee to Minneapolis to Salt Lake City, that have also lifted beekeeping bans in the last two years. Many towns, like Hillsboro, Ore., have done the same, and still other places, like Oak Park, Ill., and Santa Monica, Calif., are reconsidering their prohibitions.

Nationwide, hives are being tucked into small backyards and set alongside driveways; even the White House has installed some. Beekeeping classes are filling up quickly, and new beekeeping clubs are forming at the same time that established ones are reporting large jumps in membership.

At Mr. Barrett’s club, for instance, membership has more than doubled, to about 900, in the last year. In Los Angeles, the Backwards Beekeepers club has 400 members — up from six members two years ago. And in Denver, a club that was formed last year already boasts a roster of 200.

“Everyone who teaches a beekeeping course is finding themselves popular all of a sudden,” said James Fischer, 53, an instructor at New York City Beekeeping.

One force behind this rise of beekeeping is the growing desire for homegrown and organic food. Another, more complex one is the urge to stem the worrisome decline in the nation’s bee population.

The number of bees has been falling since the end of World War II, when farmers stopped rotating crops with clover, a good pollen source for bees, and started using fertilizers. Pesticides and herbicides became common as well. In cities, native plants were ripped out in favor of exotic ones that were not good for bees.

Then, four years ago, honey bee colonies mysteriously started to die around the country. This drop-off, called colony collapse disorder, added to the mounting health problems, like mites and diseases, that bees are facing. About 30 percent of the country’s managed colonies have died; around a third of the deaths are related to colony collapse disorder, according to the Agriculture Department.

“We don’t know the primary cause, but we know the combination of poor nutrition, heavy pesticide use and bee diseases have put bees into a tailspin,” said Marla Spivak, an entomology professor at the University of Minnesota and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for her work on honey-bee health.

Whatever the cause of colony collapse disorder, “People want to feel that they are doing something to help,” said Dave Mendes, president of the American Beekeeping Federation in Atlanta. “Having a few beehives in your backyard can make you feel better.”

But beekeeping is forbidden in many places. Some of the bans arose after World War II. Cities, seeking to eradicate any traces of agriculture within their limits in order to show they were full-fledged municipalities, forbade the raising of livestock, chicken and other creatures used in food production. Another wave of prohibitions came 20 years ago with the arrival of “killer bees” from Mexico. “People thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to die, my kids are going to die and my dogs are going to die,’ ” said Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine in Medina, Ohio. “At the time, people didn’t know what killer bees would do because they kept moving.” (Fortunately, the bees turned out not to be the threat that people feared.)

Nurturing flowers, fruits and vegetables is another factor in the rise in beekeeping, and it ranks high for Marygael Meister, who runs the Denver Beekeepers Association. In 2008, when Ms. Meister took a beekeeping class and set up two hives in her backyard in Denver, her goal was to help her more than 300 rosebushes thrive.

Ms. Meister said she had initially called the city information line and had been told it was legal to keep bees. The information was incorrect, and she received a cease-and-desist order when a neighbor complained about her hives. But instead of giving up, Ms. Meister decided to fight, showing the zeal of the nation’s new crop of beekeepers.

“I was livid,” Ms. Meister said. “I really enjoyed my bees and it was not like I was keeping a mountain lion in my backyard. It was absurd to me that the city was perpetuating the idea that Denver is so green and we’re not.”

Ms. Meister spent the next five months urging city officials to legalize beekeeping. In November 2008, the Denver City Council did so, and shortly thereafter Ms. Meister started the city’s first beekeeping club.

But legalization does not give beekeepers free rein. Cities often impose conditions on beekeepers — an annual fee, a permit, a minimum required distance between hives and nearby structures.

The City of Minneapolis, which legalized beekeeping last year, has set particularly stringent restrictions. Besides paying a $100 annual fee per hive, beekeepers there must obtain signed permission from all the neighbors within a 100-foot radius of the hives, and for neighbors within a 300-foot radius, they need 80 percent of the signatures.

For Jacquelynn Goessling, having her neighbors sign off on her hives was hardly a problem. People in her Minneapolis neighborhood of Kingfield, which she calls a “hotbed of liberal politics,” were so supportive that some wanted to host one of her hives in their own yards, or to help by planting their gardens with the kinds of flowers bees like. “Power to the bees” became a rallying cry for many of her friends. A year later, she has 12 hives citywide.

Ms. Goessling has also forged new relationships with neighbors — including the grumpy ones. Since she became the neighborhood’s “bee lady,” people want to buy her honey, either with cash or in trade for things like raspberry jam. Grateful neighbors also tell her they are getting more apples on their trees and, for the first time, seeing fruit on their arctic kiwi plants.

Eventually, Ms. Goessling would like to become a full-time beekeeper. She will be working with a local business center this winter to draft a business plan.

“If I could make $50,000 from bees, I’d quit my job so I could spend more time with my kids and have the summers off,” said Ms. Goessling, 48, a database administrator.

As Ms. Goessling dreams of a new career, other bee lovers, like Daniel Salisbury of Santa Monica, are fighting for the same opportunity.

Santa Monica models itself as an environmentally conscious city, but it has long banned beekeeping. So when city inspectors found three hives in Daniel Salisbury’s backyard two years ago, they insisted he move them. He took the hives north to his mother’s house in San Luis Obispo County, where beekeeping is legal, but he also began a drive to legalize hives in Santa Monica.

He has become so well known that people at his city-owned trailer park call to alert him when exterminators, retained by the Santa Monica housing agency, are headed toward bee swarms.

“I would chase down the swarms and literally run with my clippers to get the branch before Orkin showed up,” said Mr. Salisbury, 47, an antiques dealer, referring to a large pest-control company.

Over the last two years, Mr. Salisbury has attended Santa Monica City Council meetings, recruited a Los Angeles beekeeping club to help, and launched an e-mail legalization campaign joined by hundreds worldwide. On Tuesday, the Santa Monica City Council is scheduled to reconsider the beekeeping ban, and supporters of legalization are optimistic.

Max Wong, a Los Angeles beekeeper who has been helping Mr. Salisbury with his drive, hopes to wield some of the same political techniques in a legalization push in her city. Beekeeping rules there are a patchwork, with the hobby legal on one side of a street and illegal on the other.

“We’re in trouble and the bees are in trouble,” said Ms. Wong, 42, a member of the Backwards Beekeepers club. “We need to do something.”

Ms. Wong, a film producer who started keeping bees a year ago, wants to legalize bees not just to help hobbyists like herself, but to help feed and employ others. She sees bees as the best way to increase vegetable pollination in local community gardens and thinks that some people, like a few members of her club, could even become professional beekeepers.

Like Mr. Barrett from Queens and other new beekeepers, Ms. Wong is developing a close relationship with her bees, and she wants to ensure that others can enjoy the hobby as much as she does.

“It’s like having 35,000 pets,” she said. “I’m hyperactive, so anything that shuts down my brain is a good thing. When I’m working at a hive, I’m quiet and meditative.”

I would love to keep bees, but my husband did it when he was a kid/young teen, and says he didn't like the hassle (I know, he's so encouraging, huh?) of having to give the bees things like antibiotics and antifungals on a regular basis. He did say, however, that I could build as many bee boxes as I wanted for mason bees (you drill holes into a log or board). Mason bee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia No honey, but at least I get the joy of bees.

[Grancey]

When my brother was in college he was taking some classes involving fisheries and chickens. Anyway, he brought a bunch of chickens home for the summer as a project I suppose. This was in the middle of a neighborhood and none of the neighbors cared. The chickens wake up and start making this annoying pecking noise way before dawn. We had no coop, so I guess these were free-range chickens. They were everywhere. I walked in the door once and reported to my mother that they were roosting in the Magnolia tree. They also left eggs here and there. The smell was not good, and the mess was worse. It was fun to watch my dog chase the chickens. That was worth it. My brother claimed that a few lost their lives to the dog, but I was never witness to it. He should have built a coop.
Do it right, and it could be fun and worthwhile.

[noodle]

I have several friends that have chickens. It's difficult to keep less than four, they've found. Socialization or something. One has two large german shepards, one has two mid-sized dogs. You can have roosters in our area, but just one. And if it crows, you gotta take it out. They all say that the chickens are really affectionate and fun to have. They're currently laying fewer eggs since there is less daylight... which I didn't know before. But one of my friends gets about 15 eggs a week from her 8 chickens. If you build a fairly strong coop, cats shouldn't be an issue. The one with the two mid-sized dogs also has a couple of cats that live in her neighborhood.

[hanfan321]

My neighbor has a rooster that crows night and day. I've put a bounty on it's head. Need a hit-man to take it out.

[Fly]

we have birds on our property.......absolutely love having them,but......my nearest neighbour is like a block and a half away so,no issues with the noisy rooster.

farm fresh eggs is the way to go.........i think everyone should do it.