With a Cluck-Cluck Here ... and a Cluck-Cluck There

It is a quiet afternoon in my neighborhood in Holmdel. Out front, I can hear cars passing, people talking, and numerous dogs barking. In the backyard, I can hear the occasional sound of chickens clucking to each other.

There are six chickens living in my backyard. Initially, we decided to raise a few backyard hens for their inexpensive, healthy eggs. They supply my family, neighbors, and friends with fresh eggs. But over the past year, we've discovered other benefits to raising a backyard flock.

As a mother I have been very conscious of offering my children the healthiest possible foods on a careful budget. Eggs from well-fed backyard chickens have 25% more vitamin E, 75% more beta carotene (which you can quickly see in the beautiful marigold color of their yolks) and a third more vitamin A. These fresh eggs also have much more omega-3 fatty acids than factory farmed eggs.  And of course, they taste better.

We feed our chickens traditional pellets, our table scraps, and all fruit/vegetable peels. They also have the freedom to scratch for bugs in the back yard. Talk about a bonus! The dramatic decrease in the number of unwanted insects is tangible: grubs, mosquitoes, flies, and ticks are a thing of the past.

And then there's this other bonus: fertilizer. Vegetable peels, which take time to compost, are instead fed to the chickens and digested quickly. The chickens’ droppings are mixed with soil and water, then mixed into the earth for immediate, free fertilizer. Friends have quickly realized the benefit of this natural fertilizer and now I field requests for both eggs and “natural fertilizer." I am going green by using this type of fertilizer rather than purchasing a chemical additive.

Another plus to keeping chickens? Weeding along the fence is now done by the chickens because their natural behavior is to scratch at borders. They move along the fence during the afternoon diligently removing weeds and looking for bugs.

In addition to those benefits, the intangibles have been surprising and numerous. Callie, my youngest, has challenged herself in math and science as a direct result of these chickens. She appointed herself the egg collector and collects the eggs each day. We built a ladder so she could reach the higher level of the hen house.

Since I involved her from the planning stage to the end, this went from a math lesson to scale drawing to sawing and hammering! For fun, she has charted the number of eggs laid per day.  Because we have different types of chickens, we get different colored eggs. (By the way a hen does not need a rooster to lay eggs.)

Callie’s numerous questions began to pique the interest of the rest of the family and mini-research projects were born.

Through observation, Callie determined which breed lays which color egg.  Take a moment and think how many hours and how many days Callie and the others had to watch the henhouse to see which chicken was jumping in to lay an egg. Then waiting for the chicken to leave the box and check the nest before another chicken went in. Patience. Another bonus. Our Americana chicken lays green eggs. Callie’s idea is that this was Dr. Seuss’ motivation for writing Green Eggs and Ham.

Callie’s graphing skills and statistics abilities have been incredibly stimulated by her interest in the chickens and the variety of breeds that we brought into our backyard.

Collecting the eggs has also inspired us to question why some birds don’t lay eggs consistently and others do. Temperatures, fear, even changing the straw of the nests might stop a hen from laying until she is calm again.

As a family, we have researched what parts of the world our breeds came from. This prompted Callie to theorize that this was why the heavily feathered chickens from the mountainous regions of France continued to lay throughout the blizzards during this winter and the Mediterranean birds lay sporadically until the early spring.

We learned that chickens actually have personalities. We chuckle when we hear each other talking to the chickens and the chickens responding. My friends laugh when I go outside and one, a salmon Favorelle (pictured), waddles over and clucks to be picked up.

Overall, I continue to be amazed by how much we as a family have connected over “these birds” and how much more connected to the earth we feel as a result of them.