The Urban Bestiary

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  I find such counsel a bit prudish, feeding a recent and unnatural fear humans have developed about brushing anything at all that has a biological origin against our own skin. Owl stomachs are so acidic that any virus or bacteria is unlikely to make it back up in the pellet. If you are fortunate enough to find a wild owl pellet, then just examine it with care, delight in the tininess of the bones, and wash your hands.

  This matters, this winding of story, this intimacy with the predatory, with the very viscera of our home place. All of us together, the creatures we see and those we don’t, partake of this struggle. Paying attention, attending, we begin to live more creatively, compassionately, brightly, fearfully. Fearfully in the beautiful archaic sense—the complex yet natural twining of dread and reverence. We take our place in the difficult balance of earthen grace.

  Chicken

  The School of Lost Borders

  One midsummer morning, I looked out the window over the rim of my coffee cup and spotted a Cooper’s hawk perched on the edge of our garden shed. Even through the glass I could see this bird’s glowing yellow legs and orange eyes. Like any good birdwatcher, I rushed to get my binoculars. But in the next breath I realized, oh my Lord, that hawk was eyeing my six-week-old baby chickens! I ran out to the coop like Ma Ingalls, barefoot in the wet grass, pink flannel pajamas dragging around my feet, waving my arms and yelling, “Shoo! Bad hawk! Go away!” The hawk eyed me coolly before lifting over the shed roof, and I gathered my feathered girls into a corner of the kitchen for the day.

  I’d always been critical of farmers who bait so-called vermin such as coyotes, wolves, and cougars because they are a perceived threat to livestock. As a graduate student in eco-philosophy and environmental ethics, I penned youthfully strident papers that preached about the need for keepers of agricultural animals to protect their holdings through improved husbandry practices rather than lethal control of predators. But this hawk episode threw me right out of my ivory tower.

  My family and I belong to the growing contingent of urban dwellers who keep small flocks of backyard chickens. We began raising chickens about fourteen years ago, and we do it for many reasons: because we are seeking a deepened sense of connection in our food lives; because you can’t beat delicious fresh eggs laid by birds that are part of the family; because hens produce lush fertilizer for the garden; because it aligns us with the local, sustainable food movement; and because chickens are so darn cute. But what if I really were Ma Ingalls? What if those chickens were not my hobby but my family’s livelihood and my children’s sustenance? What if all this were true, and I had a shotgun hanging over the door? When there is a conflict between food (eggs and garden) and wildlife (raccoons, hawks, squirrels), is it a given that the human activities claim priority? And if not, then how are such questions to be navigated?

  I write today against the background sound of constant sweet cheeping—three baby chicks now inhabit a corner of our mudroom, just off the kitchen. They are buff Orpington chicks, my favorite heritage breed, the quintessential golden Beatrix Potter chicken, like Henny-Penny, whose three-toed stockings the hedgehog laundress Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle despaired over: “They are very bad to wash.” Buff Orpingtons are wonderful hens; good layers; sweet-tempered; great for family flocks; and their chicks are a classic fluffy yellow. When we first started raising chickens, it was still something of a curiosity in the city. Now urban chickens are so hip they’re almost passé. Neighbors are comparing breeds and coop plans, local Tilth organizations can’t offer enough City Chickens 101 classes to meet the demand, and that nice clucking sound is becoming more common on walks through urban neighborhoods across the country.

  We recently spent two months traveling in Kenya and Tanzania, staying a fair bit of the time in small, off-the-track villages. There, nearly everyone keeps chickens, and they roam free in the dirt roads, alleys, fields, and schoolyards. Most homes have a shelter for their chickens, with a roof and a nest box, but the hens and chicks are never fed or locked away from dogs or predators. They scratch for their sustenance and get by (or not) on their chicken wits. So it is with a measure of self-directed irony that I tell you that until our chicks are about five weeks old, we raise them in the kitchen, where, like most other urban chick moms, I hover over them and cater to their every desire as if they were newborn humans.

  So many urban chicken people respond blithely when I ask them their reasons for keeping hens. Something along the lines of We want our food lives to be in line with the rhythms of nature. Sure, chickens lay eggs, so in tending them, both kids and adults remember that food originates in a place, and with work, and through other creatures, rather than materializing preboxed from the store. But here is a singular paradox: the most essential way that urban chickens draw us into “nature’s rhythm” is by putting us at odds with nature. Inviting chickens into our lives, we also invite raccoons, bird-hunting hawks, and, depending on where we live, perhaps also coyotes or foxes. Certainly we invite rats.* We intentionally bring into our yard and under our care flesh-and-blood birds that are prone to diseases and health crises that city folk in their right minds never have to think about.

  Today, Ethel the barred rock continues her recent spate of broodiness. She will not leave the nest box, and the other hens cannot get in the box to lay their own eggs. She is hostile toward anyone who might threaten her imagined clutch of eggs—her future, impossible brood of chicks. (We keep no rooster. It is one of the most common questions I field from urban people regarding chickens: How do you get eggs with no rooster? Using their own human bodies as an analogy, most people can figure it out quickly enough—you need a rooster to get chicks, not eggs.) And so I write with a timer on. Every hour it rings, and I take a break to go outside and chase Ethel off the nest, remind her of life beyond her small pile of straw, hope that she will recover herself and rejoin life in the chicken yard. The common home remedy for broodiness in the chicken-keeping lore is to dunk the hen in cold water and hold her there long enough to lower her body temperature, which has been raised by the creation of a highly vascularized brood patch. But the chasing method has always worked for me before, and I am going to give it a shot before traumatizing young Ethel in the dunk tank.

  This little drama falls on the heels of Adelaide the buff Orpington’s medical emergency. Just a month ago, she was near death, starving due to an impacted crop that prevented her from swallowing. I did some fancy chicken nursing, using a long eyedropper to squeeze mineral oil down her throat, massaging the crop, then holding poor Adelaide upside down by her feet as I stroked her esophagus, and the mucusy blockage poured out. What on earth is a nice city girl like me doing in a situation like this? Worrying about broody hens and chicken-eating raccoons and icky impacted crops? But I love it. Love it. I am enlivened, lively, in love with the creativity I feel in this life of lost borders, the preconceptions of urban-rural-wild breaking down around me.

  Below are my reasons for bringing domestic chickens, a traditionally rural beast, into the urban bestiary and my own backyard. The first few points echo lists that are proliferating through countless magazines, newspapers, and blogs discussing urban-sustainability issues. The others are a little different. I am not suggesting everyone run out and get chickens. Far from it. I am concerned about the current trend being just a trend (“Chickens are the new black,” claim an infinity of blogs) rather than a well-thought-out way of life. But it can be the latter, and whether individuals choose to keep chickens or not, the presence of chickens in the urban landscape rouses and educates us.

  Chickens are lovable. I love how they look, how they walk, and how they tilt their heads to look you in the eye. I love their funny, fluffy shape. I love their unique chicken intelligence, which constantly surprises me. I love the soft, calming cluck-cluck sound they make. I love how, if you choose the right breed, chickens are sweet, docile, and friendly. I love how when you plop them onto an urban lot their expression says, Yeah, I can do this, as if they own the place, as if there is no question that they
belong just where they are.

  Chickens lay gorgeous fresh eggs. There are few things more satisfying than gathering your own eggs, especially when they are the most beautiful, golden-centered, delicious eggs you have ever tasted. There have been various attempts to question the nutritional value of eggs. We have been told that the cholesterol in eggs will clog our arteries; followers of macrobiotics claim that as a highly yang food, eggs will unbalance our systems; there is even an alternative-health notion that eating chicken eggs might mess with our human reproductive systems. But none of this is consistent with the traditional wisdom about eggs. Eggs produced by healthy, happy chickens fed a nourishing diet are among the most nutrient-dense foods on earth. There is a reason that eggs from domesticated chickens are a part of every major cuisine in the world, from Japanese egg-noodle soup, miso nikomi udon, to Nicaraguan red beans with poached eggs, sopa de frijoles. It might seem like your dearest friends and family couldn’t possibly love you more than they already do, but just try giving them a bowl of your homegrown eggs. Backyard chickens breed more love in the world.

  Children can take a great deal of responsibility for raising chicks and keeping chickens, and this is good for them. When Claire was tiny, she would go out with her eggs basket, words she could barely pronounce, and gather the eggs to make blueberry muffins while Genevieve the Polish hen perched on her shoulder. Now that she is fourteen years old and both a food activist and a baker in her own right, I believe sharing our household with food-producing animals helps to grow a sense of self-sufficiency, a broader sense of home, an expansive sense of kindness, and a deepened relationship to huevos rancheros and french toast.

  Chickenomics. There is another dimension to chicken-keeping that plays into the modern psyche. I read a quote by the editor of Backyard Poultry magazine, Elaine Belanger, which said that whenever the economy tanks, their subscriptions soar. This doesn’t make common sense—after all, unless you are supremely resourceful, it takes some money to get set up for a backyard chicken flock. The ongoing cost of chicken food isn’t that much less than the cost of eggs, and anyway, it’s certainly not buying eggs that is making or breaking us. The current popularity of chickens might have to do with the economy, but it can’t be just about money. Wondering over this, I picked up the phone and gave Belanger a call. “You’re right,” she told me. “On the surface, there is a myth that growing our own food will save money, and I get calls from editors in New York who are covering the economy, and they think that’s what it’s all about. But if you’ve raised chickens, you know that it’s something else.” In troubled times with multiple crises—economic collapse, ecological distress, global violence, swine flu, bird flu—there’s a longing for independence, self-reliance, security, food safety, and a desire to bring a dimension of the earthen “idyllic” into our daily lives. Chickens give us a hands-on, tangible sense of satisfaction on all of these levels—it’s both a practical and emotional satisfaction. But Belanger points out that the current resurgence in homestead-style practices, including chicken-keeping, predates the economic crisis by a couple of years. I believe we are in the midst of a long political cycle in this country that is leaving us feeling empty and desperate for authenticity. We are finding, and creating, meaning in the most truly grassroots of actions—those that begin with our own household grass.

  Speaking of which—chickens are adept at removing grass and tilling garden beds.

  Increased understanding of intraspecies intelligence, and the attendant compassion such understanding brings. I often hear that chickens are dumb, and surely the best-ever articulation of this position comes from Werner Herzog, who in his famous and oft-parodied intonation expounds on chicken stupidity with such a singular combination of gravity and passion that you’d think he was lecturing on a beloved topic in medieval philosophy. In a brilliant forty-second video by filmmakers Siri Bunford and Tom Streithorst, Herzog sits enthroned in a dusky room upon a heavy upholstered chair, surrounded by macabre examples of mammalian taxidermy. Imagine it in Herzog’s accent:

  The enormity of their flat brain, the enormity of their stupidity is just overwhelming. You have to do yourself a favor when you are out in the countryside and you see chickens. Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity, and the intensity of the stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing. By the way, it’s very easy to hypnotize a chicken. They are very prone to hypnosis, and in one or two films I’ve actually shown that.

  So wonderful! I have studied chicken-hypnosis techniques but haven’t yet succeeded in hypnotizing my own chickens (I’ll keep trying). And though I’ve watched this little video over and over, and love it more every time, of course I disagree with Herzog. New research sides with the chicken. In his extensive studies, Dr. Chris Evans, a psychology professor at Macquarie University in Australia, has found that chickens have a stable and sophisticated social organization (maintained by an established pecking order); they have at least twenty-four vocalizations with which they communicate a wealth of information to one another, including separate alarm calls for different kinds of predators; they have remarkable problem-solving skills. And of course, they are good and watchful mothers. Anyone who has paid attention to her own backyard or barnyard flock knows that every chicken has a distinct personality—a sign of plasticity in behavior that is also an indicator of intelligence. Chickens do not possess human intelligence, certainly, but they have a unique chicken intelligence in abundance, and it never fails to surprise me. I observed their problem-solving skills this winter during our once-a-year Seattle snowfall. This was the first time these chickens had ever seen snow, and they were thoroughly unimpressed. At the far end of their yard is a perch, and there is a wooden crate in the middle. It took some trial and error, but the hens figured out how to get from place to place and back into the coop without their feet ever touching the ground (even Tom, a chicken-intelligence doubter, had to call this crafty).

  I find a kindred spirit in one of my most beloved authors, Flannery O’Connor, who was on television when she was six years old because she had taught her cochin hen to walk backward. In the 1932 film clip, there is a grainy black-and-white shot of young Flannery, then called Mary, with chickens jumping on her shoulders, and a knit beret on her blond head. She raised poultry her whole life and always found in the birds a source of peace and artistic inspiration. She later said famously of the backward-walking-chicken-on-television event, “I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.” And ethologist Margaret Morse Nice, one of my greatest personal inspirations in avian observation, had a flock of brown leghorns as a girl, “all named and cherished,” which she studied intensively. Margaret and her sister told their family that chicken observations taught them about bird behavior generally, but also about human psychology, a position their parents took to be anti-Christian!

  Chicken time. In a culture that promotes microtasking, multitasking, and an obsessive adherence to schedules and time-based accomplishment, the chickens offer a way to step out of the rush of human-measured minutes and seconds and into a rhythmic sense of time based on light and warmth and the turning of the earth.

  Chicken time runs daily. To prevent visits from raccoons and rats, our chickens get closed up in their coop every night, and then let out every morning. I can’t tell you how often I rebel against going out into the damp cold, only to feel blessed by the fresh air, the dampness in my hair, the glimmer of moon, the last moments of shining Venus that I would not have experienced otherwise. Even in deepest winter, I am drawn outdoors by my chicken duties every night and morning. And on the nights that I forget until it is so dark I can’t see into the coop, I reach in and count the lumps of feathers by feel, making sure everyone is tucked in. Always there is a soft gentle clucking. Nighttime clucking, whisper clucks. A sweet sound to take to bed.

  Chicken time also runs seasonally. In colonial America, the full moons of early spring were called Egg Moons. The l
onger days and increased light of the season stimulated the pituitary glands of the hens in the chicken yard, and as the hours of sunlight increased, so did egg laying. Those of us with chickens in the backyard know this cycle well. Though our first-year hens may lay every day during the winter, by year two or so the number of eggs gathered in the dark months dwindles. Then, just as we feel our own spirits rising with the light and green of spring, we watch the hens’ natural response to the season spill forth from their little coop.

  As we move from summer back to the season of darkness, I have observed that my own impulse to cozy down into an early bedtime is mirrored by the mood of the chickens. Starting in late summer, the girls put themselves to bed earlier and earlier every night, following the earlier sunsets, and on dark autumn mornings they look at me like I’m crazy if I open their door too early—Why would we come out into all that cold, wet darkness, thank you very much? In the summer, my house-sitter wondered about corralling the hens into the coop at night, and I told him not to worry—“They put themselves to bed at nine, and you can just close the door.” That winter we left the chickens in the care of the same friend. “Nine o’clock, right?” he asked. “Oh dear, no, now they go to bed at five thirty!” I love how their little bums look, all feathery, settled in to roost for the night. And I love following the seasons in chicken time.

  Livestock lineage. Chickens bring us into sympathy with the round of life, death, and food that follows humans across time and cultures. When we were in Tanzania, we walked with our young Masai guide up to his village in the Usumbara mountains. Once there, we sat with some of the women in his family in their dark, windowless home of mounded earth. We loved seeing Melubo’s simple home, the boma where he was born; we sat there in the smoky dark (they cook on an indoor fire, but there is no chimney), and as our eyes adjusted, he translated his aunt’s questions to us. You have only one child? (Peals of laughter; she has eight!) Do you have cattle? When do you plant your corn? Claire told them we had chickens, and I realized that this could lead to misconceptions, as if all urban Americans raise chickens alongside their one, fetishized, REI-outfitted child. But it seemed too much to convey, and too silly. Back at home, though, I think of the chickens in Africa and the families that rely on them. I think again of Ma Ingalls, so grateful to the neighbor who started a flock for her at the new homestead in De Smet. I think of the adult Flannery O’Connor, sick with her progressing lupus and standing on crutches near her birds at the Savannah estate. And I think it is good. Good to stand in this lineage, to know something about the lives of all these people that I couldn’t have comprehended without hens of my own.