These are my neighbors girls, or at least were. After five years and three roosters, someone squealed like a pig on her and along came not the big bad wolf, but someone far worse, BYLAW!
She has had numerous hens and from time to time a rooster. It is a 50/50 chance that there will be at least one boy in the mix of chicks, and at that stage, being fluffy and yellow they all look alike. She never kept the boys for long and found them a good home. We did have this one rooster that apparently needed a lesson in time telling and crowing. He would crow at any time except dawn and it always sounded like he had sore throat. It was quite pathetic and strangely amusing at the same time.
Now for those naysayers out there, the girls were not messy, loud or smelly. They were just chickens going about their day to day routine of scratching, routing, and eating everything in sight, including my neighbours garden. During any other season then summer, they were completely free range, much to the chagrin of Harry, who upon seeing them didn't quite know what they were but somehow how to get a closer look. He did actually get a mouth full of tail feathers once. I don't know who was more startled, the dog or the hens. No one was worse for wear! During gardening season the hens were confined to a rather palatial spot in the middle of the garden.
Now having urban chickens has it advantages, fresh eggs (more on that later), a source of kitchen scrap removal and the pleasant cooing and clucking when working outside. The eggs are wonderful, a yolk that practically glows in the dark, a good thing really, compared to the wimpy yolks of store bought battery hens. There is nothing that compares to the taste of fresh still warm from hatching eggs. In the winter I don't compose, but bring my kitchen scraps over to the girls and they love every morsel of them. I once started a hen war with a few over ripe strawberries, it was not pretty!
And what about those that are opposed to urban chickens saying that they bring predators around, we live in coyote alley and never have I've seen a coyote in the yard going after the girls, or an hawk or owl. We do have coyotes in the back alleys but it is the garbage that my other nieghbours have left out and not properly done up. Don't get me started on that.
So after all this time some big wig in bylaw after a complaint from a neighbor and we have had no new people move in, so I really don't know where that came from, no more urban chickens, no more laughable antics from them ( they loved to take dust baths in abandoned pots on the deck) and worst of all no fresh eggs. City Hall get you head out of your you know what and wake up to the joys of urban animals!
