Country Roads' Associate Publisher James Fox-Smith, brandishing a weather-foretelling chicken.
All this talk about America’s egg crisis reminds me that we haven’t talked about chickens in a minute. With bird flu pushing egg prices to record heights, articles about keeping backyard chickens—usually with dewy photos of plump hens tiptoeing through garden settings—are everywhere. “Doesn’t look that hard,” I imagine America’s omelet-fanciers muttering.
Case in point: last week, Country Roads’ Jordan LaHaye Fontenot revealed that her husband, Julien, had come home with not one but two chicken coops he’d found on Facebook Marketplace. Then, Julien promptly fell down the online chicken rabbit hole, which I know is deep because I’ve been keeping chickens since our kids were small. Our cooking and gardening activities have benefited from the fresh eggs and enhanced compost, and, on warm spring evenings, we’ve loved the simple pleasure of watching the social antics of our ragtag flock from plastic lawn chairs, gin and tonics in hand. We’ve also encouraged a lot of carnivorous wildlife to develop a taste for chicken. So, before the price of eggs has you following Julien down the chicken rabbit hole, I offer six rules of chicken-keeping for your consideration.
[Read more poultry pondering from publisher James Fox-Smith in these stories: "Pity the Rooster," "Tending the Flock," and "Predicting Weather by Chicken"]
6 Rules for First-Time Chicken Keepers
- Rule 1: Everybody likes chicken. I do mean “everybody.” The variety of wildlife attracted by the prospect of a chicken dinner is matched by the inability of chickens to defend themselves against anything with teeth (or fangs, or a beak). Over fifteen years we’ve lost chickens to raccoons, possums, foxes, coyotes, hawks, owls, snakes, weasels, gnats, our dogs, other people’s dogs, and stupidity—both my own and that of the chickens themselves.
- Rule 2: Chickens are stupid. At night, coerced by the sound of something snuffling about outside the coop, a chicken is apt to poke its head out through the wire for a closer look. Raccoons know this, are patient, and will eat whatever they can reach. You can see where this is going.
- Rule 3: Don’t name them. When we started out, our kids were little. Our first batch of hens got nursery-rhyme names like “Big Bird” and “Henny-Penny.” After the first few massacres, their replacements got names like “Coq-au-Vin” and “Chicken Nuggets.” Eventually, the kids stopped naming them entirely.
- Rule 4: Your coop must be impregnable. Let your chickens free-range at your own (okay, their own) risk. But once the coop door is shut, unless you’re planning to sleep in it with a shotgun, the place needs to be impenetrable. Through years of trial and error, my coop has acquired the layered defenses of a medium security prison, including heavy-gauge floor-to-ceiling mesh, high perches situated more than a paw’s reach from the perimeter (see Rule 2, above), and concreted, broken-glass-filled trenches to discourage tunneling. None of this is worth a damn if the predator is already inside. Last spring I got six baby chicks and put them in the special “nursery” coop that you’ll need for raising defenseless things to egg-laying age. Since this boxed-in coop sits on stilts, is screened with layers of wire, and had never been breached, I was confident they’d be fine. In the morning there wasn’t a chick to be found. It took a while to discover the culprit. In a laying box beneath the straw was a sleepy, five-foot rat snake … with six sad little bumps along the length of its body.
- Rule 5: Avoid Roosters. It seems reasonable to assume that for your hens to lay eggs, they’ll require the services of a rooster. This is wrong; hens will lay happily without one, and the feminine energy will make your coop a nicer place. Roosters are handsome, but they’re also noisy, belligerent, violent rapists. Currently, my inability to tell a female chick from a male one means my flock includes three roosters, and they’re making my hens’ lives miserable. This needs to change. When you get one with a mean streak, make a gumbo. It won’t be very good, because in addition to their other bad character traits, roosters are stringy and tough. But at least you’ll have gotten rid of the problem.
- Rule 6: Eggs are expensive, but not as expensive as chickens. Sure, the secondhand coop you’ve found online doesn’t cost much. And yes, the adorable chicks at the feed ‘n seed are just a few bucks apiece. But for chicks to survive a single night they’ll need a special coop, special feed, and a heat lamp. You need to keep them alive for six months to get any eggs. Once they do start laying, they eat prodigiously. My eleven chickens get through a 50 lb sack of layer’s pellets ($24) each week. Do the math. It never made sense to me that you could buy a dozen eggs for a dollar, anyway.
If you still long for chickens, then bravo! In my experience, chicken-keeping is neither low-maintenance nor for the squeamish, but if you enjoy cooking, gardening, caring for creatures, and building things, I can’t think of a more rewarding pastime. And if it doesn’t work out, you can always put the coop back on Facebook Marketplace. There’s a chicken-fancier born every minute.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
