The Urban Flock
Posted to Food security, Simple living
How a bunch of city chicks taught me about sustainable community building
(And, they are walking fertilizer factories)
By Allison Adams
I try to do my part to live sustainably: I volunteer with a local environmental organization and support the Nature Conservancy. I ride my bike, walk, or take transit to work. I keep my thermostat set at a reasonable level. I hang my clothes outside on a line when the weather is nice.
I admit it, though—saving the planet was not first on my mind when I decided to start keeping chickens. I grew up in Rabun County, Georgia, at the southern tip of the Appalachians, and I wanted to link my rural roots to my more recently established city self here in Decatur, Georgia, a small city (population about 18,000) just a few miles east of downtown Atlanta.
Also, it was about the eggs. Fresh, yummy eggs with yolks so richly yellow you’d think they were little sunshines.
But I was soon to discover that urban flock-keeping is about much more. Indeed, there is a growing movement of city folk who are discovering the pleasures of keeping a few chickens. Books have been written. Documentary films have been made. And for many of us, one of the greatest satisfactions is knowing that our food hasn’t traveled thousands of miles over land and sea, at the cost of untold quantities of fuel, to get to our tables.
Once I got started – in league with my next-door neighbors, with whom I share the costs, labor, and benefits of our birds – I quickly saw what community can really mean in a metropolitan area. Our little poultry project unexpectedly tapped into an exciting local movement of folks who wanted to model a certain kind of ethical living –eating locally and sustainably – and to connect with one another in an often isolating and artificial urban world.
The three of us have for the past two years taught a workshop called “Chicks in the City: Keeping an Urban Flock for Eggs, Compost, and Endless Amusement.” How we came to teach this class is a story of identity, friendship, and flock formation, you might say. My neighbors also grew up in rural places, in West Virginia and western North Carolina, and shared my longings for something like home. When we discovered to our surprise that it was legal to keep poultry in Decatur, we decided one evening in 2004, during an across-the-back-fence chat, to give it a shot.
Cluckapalooza!
In spite of living quite congenially next door for ten years, my neighbors and I had never has any real imperative to get to know each other well. But for this project, they brought design and carpentry skills that I lacked, and I had an existing building on my property that would serve as a fine henhouse.
We began meeting for dinner to pore over poultry books, draw up plans, and research local breeders. Together we hammered, stapled, and stretched chicken wire on our new coop, most of which we built from recycled materials. One afternoon we headed north together to pick out two Buff Orpington chicks from a breeder. I will never forget the late summer evening our first five pullets were at last happily scratching and clucking in the coop, as the three of us sat watching with our (what else?) cocktails raised to new friends—feathered and otherwise.
News of our endeavor spread quickly. Neighbors we had never met soon tapped on our doors, curious about our birds. Drawn to what amounts to an exotic animal in the midst of Georgia’s most densely populated city, they wanted their kids to understand where their scrambled eggs (and chicken dinners) came from. Neighborhood kids brought other neighborhood kids. We would often find ourselves delivering informal lectures on the requirements and benefits of keeping chickens in the city.
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