It all began with an energetic woman who called herself "The Chicken Lady."
Last fall at the annual CLASH (Cape Land and Sea Harvest) Festival, Sarah Swain waxed poetic about the joys of raising chickens. With two toddlers in tow, she stood before a crowd huddled in a tent during a torrential rainstorm and made us laugh with stories of her fine feathered friends.
At the end of her talk, she cracked open one of her eggs and then one of the commercial eggs bought at a nearby grocery chain. Her enthusiasm was like catnip, but the two eggs she showed us side by side on a plate proved that home-raised eggs were certainly worth pursuing. The egg from Swain's chickens had a large deep yellow yolk and stood up pertly on the plate with the albumen hugging it closely. The other egg had a pale yolk and looked like a droopy mess. I wanted chickens, and I wanted them right away.
But autumn is not the time to get chickens. No matter how often I asked anyone in the know, the answer was the same: Wait until spring.
A few weeks ago my husband came home from work and handed me the phone number of Maureen McIvers in East Falmouth. She builds chicken coops and sells them, along with four baby chicks, on Craigslist for $125. I called and made plans to visit May 9. Everyone in the family, including our daughter's boyfriend, wanted to come along and pick out a chick.
We're not alone in our quest to raise chickens. Backyard chicken coops are popping up across the country, and suppliers are struggling to keep up. "The chicken thing has gone crazy," says Rick Sundelin, owner of Cape Cod Feed and Supply in West Barnstable. "We can't get enough chickens. We had a chicken seminar in March and we didn't think it was going to be that great a turnout because not many people signed up for it, but the whole parking lot was full."
Bud Wood, president of Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa — one of the largest poultry hatcheries in the country — says his company is also struggling to keep up with demand. An upswing in business was noted last year, when the hatchery shipped a record-breaking 1.7 million chicks. "This year we've been running at full capacity and have been selling out four to six weeks in advance," he says.
Both sellers say chickens have grown in popularity because more people want to know where their food comes from. They also think the economy has brought out a self-sufficient mentality, citing the rise in home gardening.
Andrew Beals, technical manager at Poulin Grain in Newport, Vt., gave the seminar at Cape Cod Feed and Supply. He opens each presentation by asking for a show of hands of first-time chicken owners. At the March seminar in Barnstable, about 80 percent of those attending raised their hands. He then asks those who've raised chickens before to raise their hands.
"Then I tell the people that are doing (it) for the first time to look around the room and see who the people are who have experience, because it's a good source of answers to questions and references, along with whoever is working at the feed store," he says.
I took his advice in my new chicken venture, beginning with McIvers, who sold me my chicks. McIvers has been raising chickens for 12 years and has 10 adult hens. "I've been on the quest for the perfect chicken house, so I've built a lot of chicken houses for myself," she says. "I've found the perfect chicken house for me, so now I build them for fun and profit."
I wanted six chickens, so McIvers sold me two more than the originally advertised four, because she advises that people get all their baby chicks from the same source at the same time. "It can be difficult or violent to introduce new individuals to an established flock," she warns.
Baby chicks are a lot of work and won't produce eggs for five to six months, so some people choose pullets, which are older and ready to lay eggs, when they begin a backyard chicken coop. Even though pullets are easier, we decided to start with chicks because we wanted to socialize our chicks so they would be friendlier toward us.
"Baby chicks can become quite attuned to their people, and the socialization process is important," says McIvers. "Even though they might have a primitive brain there is definitely a lot of cognition going on."
"Chicken Lady" Swain agrees. "They're just so fun, and handling them a lot and giving them attention when they're little works out when they get older because then they really do come when you call them," says the Centerville resident.
Swain has raised chicken for three years. She grew up in Erie, Pa., and spent summers on her aunt's farm, where chickens were raised for eggs and meat. But she didn't actually think about getting chickens for herself until she inherited some chicks.
Her mother, who lived in Marblehead, wanted to raise chickens for years. She read everything she could about them and had a coop built. She finally ordered her first batch of chicks after she became sick.
"They came the day after she passed away. So I kind of do it in her honor," Swain says. "I like looking out my window and thinking she would love this. It makes me happy."
Unfortunately, Swain's entire flock was wiped out by predators about a month after I heard her presentation at the CLASH Festival. This spring she got 18 new chicks and is ready to begin again — with much better coop reinforcements. Even though most Cape chicken owners she knows don't bury their fences against predators, she's not risking her flock again because they are like pets to her family.
She has a new, sturdier coop and will have a small, fully enclosed run with a roof and buried fence as well as a bigger enclosed run that's portable so she can move it around her yard to provide her chickens with fresh grass.
"I think the eggs taste better and they're supposed to be a lot more nutritious if they have access to fresh grass," she says. "I've gotten local eggs where the people don't let the chickens have fresh grass and the yolks don't seem to be as orange."
Fairhaven resident Ann Richard grew up in a family that raised chickens and started her own flock shortly after she and her husband bought their first home five years ago. Their foray into chicken ownership began with three baby chicks. Unfortunately two of them were roosters, which she can't raise because her neighbors are pretty close. She found a farm in Dartmouth that would take the roosters and even visited them afterwards.
Now Richard has seven chickens and several of them are rescue chickens that she has taken in because their owners couldn't care for them or simply abandoned them.
"They are wonderful pets," she says. "Seriously, they know us. They know when we come home. We open the gate, they come running over. It's amazing."
But these are pets with benefits that a dog or cat can't provide.
"Once you've had eggs from a chicken that you know, you never want to buy them in the grocery store — ever. There is no comparison," she says.
"Even if you just crack them you can tell that they're fresher. There's nothing like walking out in the morning and getting a warm egg and bringing (it) in and cooking it and eating it. It's amazing, and on the way you can pick some parsley in the garden and you can be pretty self-sufficient."
At the time I'm writing this my chicks are 11 days old and they've been with us for seven days. They are housed in the coop that McIver built, in a heated half-finished room in our basement. They also have a heat lamp, and when the temperature dips a bit low in the coop (there's a thermometer in there for easy reference) we turn on a space heater. Every person in our family still checks on them first thing when we wake up, and I visit them about 10 times a day. Our 13-year-old son, Tommy, is particularly vigilant. He holds each chick every single day, despite the difficulty in catching them.
We chose a mixed lot of breeds because we wanted our chicks to be distinguishable from each other. They certainly are.
Sassy, a Black Australorp, hated to be picked up when we first got her and squawked loudly in protest. Now she is the first chicken to climb onto my hand, with or without food as a bribe.
Buttercup, a White Rock chick, is equally fearless and loves the bling. Every time she sees my diamond ring in the coop, she immediately runs over and pecks at it.
Piper, a Silver-laced Wyandotte, is also a character. Our daughter's boyfriend, Gary, has put in the time socializing his chick, and it is paying off.
The three Blue Andalusians (Dumpling, Tinkerbell and Rosie) are smaller and more skittish. I'm guessing they will never be as social, but each morning when I open the side door to their coop all of them come running to great me. The adventure is only beginning.
