Natural Perspectives:

Vic and I got our chicken permit from the city in October, but I have procrastinated getting our hens. I had planned on painting the coop first, as it came with only primer on it. But after all these months, I still hadn’t painted it. I finally decided that a primer coat was good enough.

I had a trip planned to San Diego a couple of weeks ago. I called Rainer Kleinschmidt, my farmer friend, and asked him to pick out some nice hens for us. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any buff Orpington hens this year, which was the breed that I wanted. Apparently, they aren’t very good at avoiding coyotes, so he stopped raising them.

Rainer recommended black sex-linked hens because they have good dispositions and are good egg layers. They are a cross between a barred Plymouth Rock rooster and a Rhode Island red hen. All of the males carry the color of the black-and-white barred Plymouth Rocks, while all the females are black with some red on their breasts. That makes determining their sex at hatching a very simple job.

I had never heard of this cross, so I asked for two of them, plus an Australian breed that I knew about called a black australorp.

When I arrived at his farm, Rainer was still catching chickens. These were definitely free-range birds, having the run of the farm. I’m not sure how he cornered them, but he came up to the house with a box of three. He took them out one by one to show them to me. They were magnificent!

The first, a black sex-linked, was a beautiful black with glossy green on her back and a lot of red feathers around her neck. The second was the black australorp, a gorgeous all-black bird. The third hen turned out to be my “Pullet Surprise.” She was 6 months old and quite agile. As soon as the box was opened a tad, surprise! She flew out and dashed about the yard. I hadn’t planned on helping catch the birds, but it was obvious that the task called for two people.

Rainer and I formed a phalanx (a very small phalanx, to be sure), squatting low to the ground with our arms spread. Duck-walking, we closed in on the wary hen. She looked for an opening to escape. Naturally, she headed for me, sensing that I was the weak link. And she was right. I wasn’t about to catch her. Chickens have beaks and claws.

I learned from Rainer that there is a technique for catching a hen. If you can manage to hold your hand just above its back, the hen thinks that you’re a rooster. A hen will squat, stretch its neck out parallel to the ground and wait patiently to be mounted. That’s when you’re supposed to grab its feet. I left that part to Rainer. I was still thinking about the beak and claws.

Chickens are not exactly outfitted like eagles or hawks, but I didn’t want to find out how much damage they could do with the equipment they had. I’m sure with time I’ll become comfortable handling them, but I want to get to know them better first.

Rainer transferred the three hens to my animal carrier, and home we went. I wondered how long it would take them to adjust to life in my small urban coop after they had the run of a 5-acre farm. The answer is about a day.

The first thing the hens did was scrape and scratch the dirt in their run, using those sharp claws. Chickens love to scratch. Vic joked that they had already formed an escape committee and were beginning a tunnel. Fortunately for us, they have chicken brains. They were quickly distracted by all the seeds and bugs that they turned up in the dirt. They dug first in one spot and then another. The tunnel never materialized.

I had read that chickens that eat greens in addition to their feed pellets lay eggs with a higher omega-3 content. A high level of omega-3 makes the eggs healthier for us to eat, so I pulled a handful of weeds for the hens. They clucked happily and downed them in an instant. I pulled the bottom leaves off my cabbages, chard, kale and lettuce. They gobbled them up. I picked nasturtium leaves for them. That turned out to be their favorite green, along with sow thistle.

Slowly but surely, the chickens and I are weeding my garden. I do the greens selection and they provide disposal services. I can’t let them run free because they’d eat my garden down to bare dirt in a day or two.

As they recycle the greens and their chicken feed into manure, I rake it up and put it into the compost bin. Eventually, that compost goes onto my garden to make more vegetables. I’ve got a whole circle-of-life thing going on in the garden now.

The hens eat leftovers from our kitchen and table as well. They like leftover rice, bread crusts, apple cores, fruit and vegetable peels, you name it. About the only thing I’ve given them that they didn’t like was the rind of brie.

The first full day they were here, I sat by the coop and watched them most of the morning. I was waiting for that first egg. The younger black sex-linked hen laid the first one. I was thrilled.

I no longer sit by the coop, but I do visit them several times a day to give them greens, and check to see if they’ve laid any eggs. We used the last of our store-bought eggs in a French lemon tart last week.

We’re now totally dependent on our hens for eggs. We got 14 eggs the first week, so I think this is going to work out just fine.

You can see more photos on my blog at greenlifeinsocal. wordpress.com.

Vic delights in pointing out to me that given our capital costs for this project, those 14 eggs cost us almost $100 apiece.

I told Vic that as more eggs are produced, our cost per egg will drop. He countered by telling me that if we continue to get 14 eggs a week, then our average cost will have dropped to a dollar an egg in a mere 100 weeks.

He doesn’t think much of my business plan.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].