The Story

WHO I AM

The first stop, on my road to owning chickens, was a call from an unknown number. When I picked up all I could hear was a bunch of chirping and an irritated postal employee telling me that my chickens had arrived. Never one to shirk my professional duties, I worked the rest of the day, and stopped by the post office on the way home.

My home is the suburban hellscape of the Baltimore-Washington-Annapolis triangle, and it has been for the better part of my adult life by chance or by choice. While not everything from the Baltimore-Washington metro area is terrible, for example, my wife has called it home for her entire life, the idea of city living -- particularly long-term -- was getting me down.

The solution? Backyard chickens.

Not that I love eggs or chicken, or even birds for that matter.

I grew South Dakota, the Wild West if you ask some people, and I didn’t spend much time around chickens. My wife was supportive, and the next thing we knew, we were on a website, picking out birds -- pullets as the website called them -- and starting down a new road.

Our chickens had arrived, by mail, in a slotted cardboard box.

I was surprised when I picked them up and this disbelief came in spite of my having paid $35 online, diligently selected birds with all the scientific precision of throwing darts, and buying everything I thought I needed to house my new chicks.

After their trip from Texas, they spent the first few weeks of their lives in a translucent plastic tub from Wal-Mart. One morning, my wife found three of them rim-sitting and trying, apparently, to decide what lay out there beyond the great plastic wall.

In the last year I have learned that our only named chicken, Charleen, likes to live in the holly tree, and I have seen how many laws, practices, and policies are targeted at this relatively innocuous hobby--how to build a coop, when to clip wings, what chickens eat and what eats chickens, how to identify roosters, molting, and brooding and how to rehome roosters to the freezer.

This journey is far from over, and, in the last week, my chickens stopped laying eggs.

I intend to figure out why, and how to make them start, or I will be making a lot of soup this fall. I will document my discoveries and trials as a record for myself and others who are interested in poultry husbandry. I will write about where chickens go when they run away, what predators live in Anne Arundel County, and maybe even how to build a better coop.

I will take you along for the ride, and you can decide if chickens are right for you and your family, or you can just enjoy watching me suffer through the learning process.

Check back regularly on Carl's Chicken to see what is going on with my journey though the would of poultry.