The logo for this website was designed by Karla Rovatti Palmer, my best friend in high school. She is a fantastic designer, working for some gigantic financial company in the Boston area. Karla – who is as much of a city/suburb girl as I ever was – visited us at the old place. The chickens loved her (who doesn’t love her). In the photo, she is holding Babette, perhaps my favorite chicken of all time. Babette was scrappy – she didn’t take any crap from any bird big or small. She was with me for 5+ years, surviving a hawk attack and an overly aggressive rooster who would claw her back open. Unfortunately an opossum eventually got her, but I’d like to think she gave him a few good pecks before she went.

My favorite (non-chicken) memory from Karla’s visit was throwing an old couch into the back of the pickup truck and headout off to the Broadway Drive-In in Burns, Tenn. Karla and I rode in the back, on the couch, waving 4th of July lights at passing cars. Kids, traveling on a couch in a pick up on a highway is not recommended, and I am sure we would have been arrested in other states on some safety violation. But it was so much fun!

Anyhoo Karla, thanks again for the logo, and Mozart is indeed the best composer of all time.

If you’re handy, you might want to build your own chicken coop to suit your property. There are lots of good photos for inspiration on BackYardChickens.com. They have separate sections for small, medium and large coops. If I could offer any advice, based on experience, make ease of access one of your top priorities. You will need to clean this thing, and I’ve crawled in chicken poop enough to wish I had designed better access. Second, but no less important, is security. Remember, everything eats chicken. I sometimes stand outside the coop and play “let’s be a predator.” If I was a raccoon, how would I get in? A fox? A weasel? An owl? A hawk? A coyote? A domestic dog? An opossum? The list goes on.

Our coop in progress is a variation of the Playhouse Chicken Coop (see image below). The enclosed run should be a huge improvement over my last setup. I can’t tell you how many times I would shake my fist and yell at the red-tailed hawks circling the open coop yard. I also learned (Ok, this could be snopes.com material, if they reported on chicken fatalities) that owls prefer to eat the heads of chickens. I once entered the coop to collect eggs and found a decapitated chicken in her nesting box. I was new to chickens at that point and easily traumatized. Johnny, our neighbor, must have been worrying about my impending nervous breakdown. Scott spent the next eight hours enclosing the covered area of the coop, which prevented future owk attacks.

Which leads into next piece of advice – be prepared for death, potentially lots of it. It’s very sad when it happens, but everything has to eat, and chicken tastes really good. I did have many birds that lived 6+ years, including Larry the rooster who died of old age. More about Larry later.

This is an excerpt/paraphrase from a document written by Francine Bradley and posed on the Univ. Calif. Coop Extension website. It was published in May 1997 – I can’t find it online.

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The egg is is considered the perfect protein – full of protein, unsaturated fatty acid, vitamins and minerals.

The following vitamins are found in significant amounts in the egg:  A, E, K and the B vitamins. In addition, the egg is an excellent source of Vitamin D. Eggs also provide phosphorus and trace minerals to the diet.

Eggs can be eaten by every segment of the population, from infants to senior citizens. Some people are concerned about cholesterol in eggs. Cholesterol is a sterol manufactured and needed by the human body. Research has shown that the amount of cholesterol eaten in foods has a variable and small effect on the amount of cholesterol in the blood. Reducing the amount of saturated fat in the diet, however, is very important. Eggs have a desirable unsaturated fatty acid: saturated fatty acid ration of 2:1. Even if your doctor has restricted eggs in your diet, you can probably eat egg whites, which are cholesterol free (I am not a doctor, this is not medical advice, don’t sue me, and ask your doctor etc.). A large chicken egg contains approximately 80 caloried and can be well utilized by the nutrition-conscious dieter.

My first chickens were the product of my husband’s boredom. Jobless at the time, he spent the mornings scouring the Internet gainful employment; in the afternoon he would hang out with our retired neighbor, Johnny. Johnny somehow convinced Scott that I would like a pair of roosters (One of my favorite people of all time, Johnny must have experienced a deliciously wicked amusement. We were city folk, after all).

Little did Scott or Johnny realize, they created a monster (in me). I fell in love with my new boys,  Coco and Rico, and chickens are like crack, I needed more. At its zenith, my hobby coop had 35+ residents, but it all started with two roosters in an exposed dog pen, sleeping on a tree branch at night. Looking back, I have no idea how two stark white, tasty pieces chicken escaped a predator’s notice. But, within a month Scott built a proper coop that we nicknamed “Gibraltar” for its predator proof-ed-ness.

Admittedly a small genre, my hands-down favorite chick flick is The Natural History of the Chicken.

I found this back in 2002, long before I had even touched a real chicken. At the time, I thought it was a ridiculous, but entertaining mockumentary about people and their chickens. Nine years later, I realize they could make a mockumentary about me, for example:

• I once spent $80 on X-rays and a vet visit for “Bettie,” one of my first hens. But, I learned that the farmer selling his “young hen” actually sold an old lady hen, whose bones had been so depleted of calcium from a decade of laying eggs that she would never stand again. Then, I paid another $16 for humane euthanasia, as I sobbed in the waiting room.
• I once kept “Babette” my absolute favorite chicken, in a cage on the dining room table for a month. A hawk had made a grab for her, leaving talon furrows down her back. Every day I applied Neosporin to her wounds until she got better. I am so glad my husband didn’t divorce me.
• I once climbed straight into a poopy chicken coop at night, armed with a flashlight, leather hearth gloves and a bath towel. A large opossum had let herself in and was getting ready to eat my flock (yes opossums love to eat chickens). I didn’t want to hurt the opossum, so I had to corner it, grab it with a towel and toss her outside the coop. I still remember the grunt as she landed in the grass. That was perhaps a bit unkind on my part, but I was annoyed, and covered in chicken crap.