Urban Chickens

There are very few communities that disallow urban chickens. Austin is no exception. I've been keeping chickens for three years, and we've absolutely loved it.

There are really only two chicken-related restrictions in the City of Austin. The first deals with noise. A crowing rooster is a valid noise complaint, but keeping only females mitigates that issue. It also means you won't be getting chicks, so if you intend to eat your yard birds, you'll need to figure something out. If you intend to just collect their eggs, the lack of a rooster is no big issue.

The second issue is proximity. Austin ordinances require that any permanent chicken structure be 30 feet from a neighboring residential structure. Having a chicken tractor or some other portable coop mitigates this issue - in some neighborhoods it's virtually impossible to get 30' from an adjacent residence, thanks to the McMansioning of our neighborhoods.

Legalities aside, here's what I've learned about keeping chickens in Austin over the last few years:

1. We got our chickens from Callahans at 4 months old. They were $8 each, and they began laying about a month after we got them. At the time, we got four chickens, all barred rocks, and they've been fairly industrious layers.

2. We get our chicken feed in giant 30 lb bags from Callahans. They're about $10 per bag, and they last about 3 or 4 months for four chickens.

3. Chickens are excellent composters - any of your kitchen scraps can go to them, though I'd avoid giving them meat. Potato skins are also not very good for them, by my girls don't touch them anyway. All of my veggie scraps go to the chickens, and they are VERY happy about it. Since we've been doing the local box from Greenling, they've been going through significantly less feed and feasting on cuttings.

4. Chickens eat bugs. We let ours free-range about 75% of the time, and they scratch all over the yard gobbling up pests. We've noticed that the more they free-range, the more orange their yolks are, which apparently is indicative of protein levels in the yolks.

5. Before they're sold, vendors are legally required to test their chickens for salmonella. This means that, if you maintain a clean coop and don't feed your chickens meat products from outside areas (and don't cross-contaminate when chopping your veggies in the kitchen), your chickens will not have salmonella. This gives me piece of mind when baking for my family - my kids can ALWAYS lick the batter, as long as the eggs are from my chickens.

6. Chickens will think of creative ways to kill themselves. In the last three years, I've had one chicken hang itself in our cedar privacy fence in a misguided attempt to fly, one decapitated by a dog in a playful dog-pecking game gone awry, and another eaten by some sort of neighborhood critter before our dogs could chase it off. That said, if you hope to salvage the meat from these inevitable deaths, you need to begin with that process immediately - if you didn't see the death, don't start warming up the soup pot.

7. Every now and then, chickens go through a biological process called "broodiness." This does not mean they'll start wearing black and listening to Morrissey. It's basically a biological change that occurs in chickens when they begin to incubate eggs. Their metabolism slows way down, their body temperature rises, and they basically sit all day, only getting up to eat and drink once. It will last about 21 days for most chickens, but you can kick your chickens out of it by removing their access to their laying spot and encouraging them to free range. (The picture above is of my now-broody chicken Delilah).

8. Eggs don't need to be refrigerated. We mark the date of gathering with a crayon on each one and leave them in the pantry cupboard, and they usually last about a month or two that way. Here's a handy universal tip: A bad egg floats in a cup of water. An egg that sits on its end when it sinks is a very fresh egg, but will be a huge pain to peel if hardboiled (because the membrane just under the shell hasn't hardened enough, so the egg will fall apart as you peel it). Eggs that sink but lay on their sides are best for hardboiling - they usually do this a week to a week and a half after laying.

How many chickens will you need? Most of the time, your chickens will be laying one egg per day (less during colder months or periods of excessively high temperature), so if you have four chickens, you'll get a dozen eggs every three days. We've got two now, and that's plenty for us - when we had more we established a pretty good system with our friends of swapping empty egg cartons for full ones.