Project Cluck / Part II: Chicken School

The Hamburg: a fine looking bird

A few weeks ago we headed to the city of Seatac to go to chicken school. Seatac is the “city” that is home to our major airport. I say “city” not to be snide – it’s just that Seatac has only been a city for a dozen or so years and it just seems kind of funny to me. The class was held at City Hall. In the city council chamber. Which is funny in itself, because it’s not like Seatac is a rural community – it’s mostly runways, hotels, parking lots and fast food places. To end all the Seatac talk in this opening paragraph, here’s all you need to know: We spent a night in one of the motels near the airport a couple years ago when we had an early flight the next morning – parking and airport transfers included. In the elevator is a sign. It says “No refunds 10 minutes after check-in.” Peculiar wording aside, two things immediately became clear: 1) the room’s not gonna be very nice and 2) best not to think about this too much.

The class was offered by King County Extension, essentially an outreach by our state’s land grant school, Washington State University. Here is some information about what land grant schools are – it’s pretty cool – basically a law signed by President Lincoln made it possible for the Federal government to grant land to the states; said land was to be used by the states to teach people how to do really useful things, like growing crops and making stuff. Not a bad idea.

I knew I was going to have a good evening after I texted our 14-year old daughter to let her know where would be, when we’d be home (like she cares!) and all that. I told her we were headed to a chicken seminar near the airport. Her response:

You guys are so awesome. CHICKEN SEMINAR.

How could I not be enthused after a response like that?

The Leghorn: a classic chicken

About sixty other people showed up, and it was pretty informative. We’d learned quite a bit on our chicken coop tour and not to boast, but we have become pretty poultry-savvy in a relatively short period of time. One thing about chickens though: there’s nothing really very intrinsically attractive or interesting about them. If you’re not into them, this whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense. So I’ll dispense with lots of chicken facts and just throw out a few highlights from the class, all of which stuck with me because of their strangely euphemistic quality:

• There are lots of resources out there, my favorite one being Backyard Chickens.com. (Before you look, guess how they represent the “o” in “com” on their home page!!) From the website comes a chart with over 40 varieties of chickens. Information is provided about their size (two only, standard and bantam); egg size, type and color; comb type (mostly pea or V-shaped, but also single, walnut and buttercup – you’re on your own here); climate hardiness (hot, cold, all); broodiness (frequent, average, seldom –this has to do with the breed’s tendency to sit on the egg and hope it hatches vs. its desire to give it up so you can go inside and make an omelet); and temperament (one to avoid may be the Buckeye – her temperament is described like this: aggressive, friendly, wild, restless. noisy.) Please email me if you’d like to make a smart remark about that descriptor. Anonymity is guaranteed.

The euphemistic high point of the chart, however, comes under the heading labeled “Purpose.” There are three possibilities: egg layer, ornamental and dual purpose. It turns out that “dual purpose” doesn’t mean ornamental / egg layer; it actually means egg layer / meat.

• The program included a lot of good information, much of it focused on getting us to really think about the nature of the commitment involved in owning backyard chickens. One slide dealt with the issue of “The geriatric chicken.” As hens age, they lay fewer eggs – though one woman in the crowd who, based on her experience must have thought this was an upper division class, proudly shared that she has a 12-year old hen that laid 80 eggs last year -- still over one per week but nowhere near the 4-5 eggs younger hens produce each week. The bullet point that dealt with this issue, in its entirety:

o Keep for life-span or ?

Here’s a slightly creepy bit of wisdom someone shared: Craig’s List is a good way to find someone willing to pick up your no longer productive hen. I would suggest having them drop by the house while the kids are at school, however.

• Finally, this little item on another page of the presentation dealing with day-to-day care and chores, tucked neatly between “Food and water” and “Play time”:

o Cleaning the Vent

Perhaps the capitalized V should have been a tipoff…but this has nothing to do with airflow in and around your coop. It involves a Q-Tip, warm water, and one end of the chicken: the end opposite the one the food goes in. Kids thus far have shown heavy interest in certain aspects of this project, but the Cleaning of the Vent, not so much .

Following the class, we did make on significant decision: where to put the coop. Due to a strange building that was on our patio when we moved in, and I suspect something unpleasant having to do with drainage, there is a nice sized patch of dirt (where we’ve grown some great tomatoes this summer) surrounded by concrete on the patio, in view of the living room. We’re going to put the coop on the concrete, with the dirt area making up the “run” where the hens can spend some outside time. (They’ll also get time in the yard when they can be supervised.) Added bonus: the coop will be just a few feet from the Weber – not that we’re planning to eat the hens, but its ominous black lid and occasional smoke emanating from it may help the training process move along a bit faster.

The Plymouth: A classic dual purpose bird

Project Cluck / Part One: Commitment

“I’ve already decided, but it takes Tim a little longer to get committed,” I heard my wife say on the phone to a friend this morning. Whether the central assertion of her statement is true or not is a question for the ages; my immediate need was to figure out exactly what I would eventually be committing to. “The coop tour was great,” she said next, “it was so fun seeing all the different kinds of chickens. It’s going to be really hard to decide which kind to get.” So I guess we’re getting some chickens.

A couple of Saturdays ago we spent about half a day visiting chicken coops, as part of a tour sponsored by Seattle Tilth (www.seattletilth.org). It actually was terrific fun, meeting proud chicken owners and seeing their gardens, coops and chickens…and dogs, cats, goats, etc. The appeal of the whole thing is undeniable. There’s something transfixing about watching hens scuttle about the yard, making funny little sounds; they appear quite self-actualized, especially when, based on how tiny their heads are, it’s not likely there’s a lot going on inside them.

In Seattle, you can have up to three hens (no roosters), plus one additional hen per thousand square feet of land. Because lots of people ask, yes, hens will lay eggs even if there is no rooster about, but said eggs contain no chicks. And –OK, this is odd – you can tell what color eggs a hen will lay based on the color of the feathers on their earlobes. There are a lot of things about the anatomy of the hen I’d rather not know, but it honestly never occurred to me that they have earlobes, let alone that the feathers on them mean anything. Also, other than color, there is no difference between eggs of different shades.

Chickens in America lay about 75 billion eggs a year, about ten per cent of the global total, and we consume over 99% of them here in the US. So each year, American hens (that is, hens living in America) produce roughly 250 eggs per person. Yikes. About sixty per cent of these eggs are used by consumers; the rest are used in processed foods (~30%) and the foodservice industry (~10%). Chinese chickens lay 390 billion eggs a year – about 293 per person. (I’ve heard but have not verified that General Tso’s chicken in particular lays very tasty eggs.) China’s chickens lead the world; I’m not sure if that’s on a per-hen basis or if they just have more chickens. My guess: American hens are the best educated, most productive ones on the planet.

(Click on this link to learn more about chickens and eggs: http://tiny.cc/iShDA. Two caveats: First, the videos are a bit disturbing – not in a PETA sort of way, so no worries there. There’s just something alarmingly earnest (Midwestern?) about the two laptop-toting “students” who guide us through Egg Facts 101, but the Introduction is a “must see.” Second, the American Egg Board, to whose site this link takes you, is not so concerned with the whole “which came first?” part of the conversation, so don’t go looking for that level of discourse on their site. The AEB are the people who bring you the “incredible edible egg” campaign. And we won’t be joining, unless we start buying up the whole neighborhood and tearing down houses – you need 75,000 layers to join. (Our little rambler sits on a 5,980 square foot lot; if we can only have one extra hen per 1,000 feet, we’d need another 15,000 lots at 5,000 square feet each – about 1,722 acres.)

But here’s the thing: based on what I’ve learned thus far about how many eggs a hen can lay in a year, there’s pretty much one hen out there for each of us. And so if there’s a chicken out there laying eggs for me, why shouldn’t it live in my backyard? Perhaps this is part of the appeal of the whole thing – talking to chicken owners; you get an overwhelming sense that having hens is just really satisfying. I wonder if it’s not partly because there’s this happy symbiosis between households and hens? It’s pretty cool, really. And that’s before you start thinking about the living conditions many hens endure, carbon footprint, and all the other stuff we’ve become conditioned to consider as consumers.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.