My life in the bush of chickens

(Big Eighties cool points if you get the allusion in the subject line without peeking!)

Below is a short clip of our chickens scratching in a corner of our backyard. (BTW, I'm disappointed that the Flip video, which plays so clear on my computer, is so herky-jerky in the YouTube version). Still, you get an idea of what they do when out of their coop or their run. I have to admit that these birds have grown on me. They are and always were Julie's project, but I've gotten attached to them -- "attached" not in the sense that I feel affection for them as pets (I don't), but attached in the sense that I've become interested in the things they do and the way they make themselves at home in our backyard.

We only let them truly range free when we're outside with them; otherwise, as small as they are now, they'd be sitting, er, ducks for neighborhood cats. During the day, we take them out of the coop and let them run around their "chicken tractor," which Julie built herself. This allows them to scratch the ground in safety anywhere in the yard (chicken tractors are by definition portable. When they do run free, they usually head over to our fig tree, whose long, low-hanging branches have created a shady area rich in soil for scratching. I spend a fair amount of time in that chicken bush trying to wrangle the trio when it's time to put them back in the coop or the run.

What I've come to enjoy is watching how they carry on -- the constant scratching, looking for bugs, efficiently sifting the soil, and their intensely social nature. When I pick up one of the three to put her back in the run or the coop, she cheeps rather volubly, which sometimes makes the other two come running, or at least makes them visibly anxious until they can be reunited.

"Can you imagine these creatures having to live their whole lives in a cage too small for them to turn around?" I said to Julie one day recently. We both agreed that having spent all of one month with chickens really brought home the lesson of the cruelty of factory farming. Last week, I spoke to my co-worker J., who was the first urbanite I know to get backyard chickens. She holds an agriculture degree from Texas A&M. She told me that her first visit to a poultry factory farm, as well as to an industrial dairy, both shocked her conscience, and made her aware of the health risks we run growing our meat this way. She told a story about watching dairy cows get shot up with hormones to artificially stretch out their milk production, and receive antibiotic injections to keep them from getting sick from the disgusting conditions they were living in. None of this is new to people who follow this issue, but I could tell that her having actually seen it as part of her classwork at A&M made an impression on her that went beyond reading about it in a book.

Anyway, urban chickens are an unexpected pleasure, I'm finding. It's a comforting sound to hear them scratching and peeping all afternoon while we're out there doing chores.