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| With my buddy, Snowball the Silkie Rooster |
About nine thousand years ago, somebody in East Asia had the
bright idea that they could nab some jungle fowl out of the wild and keep them
in a little coop by their house. Thus,
the chicken was domesticated and keeping chickens became a thing.
My personal history of keeping chickens is a bit more
recent. I live on a mostly wooded acreage
near the Twin Cities in Minnesota. In
the nearly thirty years that I have lived here, I have considered domestic
livestock from time to time. For many
years we parked our cars in a 20 x 40 pole barn. When we finally built a real garage about fifteen
years ago, the pole barn became this empty and unused space. That’s when I thought once again about
livestock, and how I had an ideal building for animals. I gave it enough thought to go through the
list of possibilities. Many farm animals
are inconveniently large and ultimately get slaughtered for meat. I decided I didn’t want to go there. Alpacas and sheep can be kept for wool, and
while my wife had a past interest in spinning, weaving, and natural dying, that
phase had passed. So, if I got sheep or
alpacas I would need to find people who could put all that wool to practical
use. I could get cows or goats and put
their milk to practical use myself. But
cows are gigantic and goats are, well….goats.
Chickens, on the other hand, produce eggs – another product I could use
myself. I grew up on a farm and am sort
of familiar with raising chickens – although, in the interest of full
disclosure, it was my mom who did the bulk of the chicken chores. I thought they were pretty boring – a barn
full of identical white hens who laid eggs for a while and then got turned into
stew. But after some net surfing, I came
to realize that there were a gazillion different breeds of chickens in an
amazing array of sizes, shapes, and colors.
They laid brown or blue or white or green eggs. They were intelligent, and had fascinating
social interactions. Flock keepers were
passionate about their birds. They were
anything but boring! So maybe it would
be chickens!
But it didn’t happen. Instead, the pole barn became a convenient
place to store junk. Realistically, I
was too busy with my career and raising my kids to think about animals.
Finally, in November of 2011, I started working part-time as
the first step in a transition to ultimate retirement. It was then that my daughter taunted me with,
“You’ve been talking about chickens for years.
Now you’ve got spare time. If you
are ever going to get chickens, it needs to happen now.”
I started building the first coop in 2012 and my first
peeping boxful of baby chicks arrived in the mail in the spring of 2013. I had become a chicken guy! My colleagues at
work followed my chicken stories with great interest. Several of them convinced me that it was
absolutely incumbent upon me as a keeper of chickens to have a few Silkies. I finally caved to their pressure and told
them I would get some Silkie
chickens, but to make it clear to the world who was responsible for these
fluffy little birds becoming members of my flock, I would name the Silkies
after those very co-workers. This, of
course, produced a severe case of workplace conflict which could only be
resolved by my naming other chickens after other co-workers. Eventually, my original batch of eighteen
chickens all had names. Many, but not
all of them are named for co-workers.
The tradition of naming chickens has continued and now I can’t imagine
owning a nameless chicken.
I finally completely retired in July of 2015. I have been thinking about starting a blog
about my chicken keeping experience since then, and today it has begun. I have been semi-seriously blogging about my international travel experiences for a few years, so it is a natural extension
for me to also write about my other great interest. In fact, while I do a major trip about once a
year, my chickens are here every day.
And they continue to be a great source of material.
My plan at this moment is to pull retrospective material
about my chickens from old letters and Facebook posts and include it in this
blog as back-dated posts to give a sense of how I got started on this endeavor
and the trials and joys of the first few years.
So ultimately this seminal post may become lost somewhere in the
middle. But for the moment, this will be
both the first and the last entry in this new blog. There will be much more to come.
