I had been gone only an hour, grocery shopping for our weekly staples on a crisp, sunny Sunday morning in late October. I parked and was walking through the backyard to enter my home when I was met by the welcome committee: Angry Bird and Loudy chirping greetings and trying to run through the chain-link fence surrounding their coops to get to me.
There is no warmer homecoming than a chorus of hen cackles and shuffling feet to let you know how happy they are to see you. This greeting may be self-serving—a begging for scraps, apple cores and leftovers disguised as hospitality—but it has always melted my heart.
Angry Bird and Loudy are two of our four backyard chickens. My husband, Tommy, and I began raising our flock in 2017.
Angry Bird is a 2-year-old Lavender Orpington, a regal, rotund white bird with cream-colored accents and a distinct red comb. She struts around with the confidence of a runway model, and her name commemorates a heinous crime she committed. She is strong and provides us with about five brown eggs a week.
Loudy is an Andalusian, an active breed with Spanish roots, who loves to forage. With beautiful blue/gray markings in her feathering, she follows our three younger kids around her coop as if she can’t wait to jump onto their laps. Our 4-year-old son, Union, named her after many nights of struggling to fall asleep due to her incessant chirping. She is a pullet, defined as a hen under a year old, too young yet to lay. If all goes well, we expect Loudy to produce about four white eggs a week as we head into spring.
Our other two girls are Mo’at and Neytiri, named after the mother and daughter duo from the Na’vi tribe in James Cameron’s movie Avatar. They are Light Brahmas whose fluff has just given way to white feathers accented by brown and black plumage around the neck, feet and tail. Mo’at and Neytiri will be very large birds, nearly 30 inches tall and weighing around 8 pounds. Each will produce about four brown eggs a week.
They make my husband and me two of nearly 12 million Americans with backyard chicken coops, according to the American Pet Products Association, which reported a 62.5% growth in U.S. chicken ownership between 2018 and 2020, the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. Millennials and Generation Z are leading the trend.
The reasons for ownership are manifold, according to surveys, experts and owners. Many people raise chickens for eggs or meat because they want to know and control what’s in their family’s food. People love having chickens as pets because of their vibrant personalities. Other owners pick their breeds solely based on friendliness and having nice dispositions so they can be used as therapy chickens. And even others say they own chickens because they use their manure as fertilizer for gardening.
Jonathan Moyle, a University of Maryland Extension poultry specialist based in Salisbury, conducts virtual and in-person education sessions on backyard farming and small-flock chicken farming. Slots that averaged 20 attendees shot up to 60 to 70 during the height of the pandemic, he says.
“Due to demand, we even offered our sessions twice a day,” Moyle says. Feed stores throughout the state also noted spikes in the sales of chicks, feed, coops and startup supplies, he says.
Demand has fallen from the peak, but the impact remains.
When our family started raising chickens six years ago, we were seeking a more direct connection to our food. We, like others, have discovered the joy that comes with the experience and the distinct personalities of each of our hens. However, there are stark realities. We might have prevented some death and suffering if we knew then what we know now about housing, feeding and protecting them.
Despite having these hens—who dine on organic feed, apples, compostable food waste and the grubs they dig up for themselves—we still end up at the store, buying eggs for our family of eight.
A hen lays best when the weather is warm, sunlight is abundant and she’s not being “broody.” That’s when she stays in the coop, neglects her own feeding and sits on unfertilized eggs because she believes she is going to hatch baby chicks—despite the absence of a rooster. (Montgomery County and, in our case, Rockville zoning laws prohibit roosters in backyard flocks.)
Angry Bird will have two or three episodes a year when she is highly broody. To help her readjust, I physically evict her from her coop and lock her out of her nesting area.
Gaines Hurdle relates. Her six hens “pass their broodiness around.” The oldest three are about 4 years old, and their egg-laying has become less consistent. Backyard chickens have an average life span of six to eight years and usually stop laying around years four and five.
Hurdle, 60, an interior designer and small business owner, had long dreamed of having backyard chickens. But she lived in Bethesda and says her husband would not comply because of the size of their yard. When they moved to their farmhouse in Potomac in 2018, she could finally make her dream come true.
“I not only have the space for my girls, but the house came with a gardening shed that easily converted to a coop and run area for them,” Hurdle says.
Hurdle loves her hens because of their unique personalities. She likes that she controls what her chickens consume and therefore knows what’s in the eggs her family—she, her husband and their two adult children—eat. And now, well, her girls are part of the family.
Hurdle sources her hens as pullets from chicken swaps across Maryland, and she has built a flock of diverse breeds.
“My favorite is Phyllis Diller, a Silkie. She is docile and loves to be picked up and petted. Our ‘alpha female’ rotates between Halle Berry, an aloof but nice Barnevelder, and Madea, our Australorp,” she says. Hurdle also owns Miranda Lambert, a friendly Orpington who likes to be picked up, and Lady Gaga, a skittish Delaware who runs around and squats to signal “succumbing”—deferring to any alpha, human or hen. Angelina Jolie, an Ameraucana, is the lowest hen in the hierarchy in Hurdle’s flock. “Being ‘henpecked’ is no myth,” Hurdle says.
Chicken life, she notes, “isn’t all fun and games. I’ve had several tragedies with my hens, from accidents with our hound dogs or just getting their foot caught up on a coop ramp”—resulting in a fatality.
Hurdle recalls visiting a chicken swap in Southern Maryland before the start of the pandemic to get some new pullets to replace the hens that had died. She described the untimely deaths to a vendor, and has a distinct memory of a young boy, wearing his 4-H uniform, looking up at her and, with no expression, intoning, “Chickens die, lady. Chickens die.”
Tommy and I had no previous experience before deciding to raise chickens. We learned the hard way that the coop doesn’t provide ironclad protection against predators, and that Marek’s disease, a kind of herpes, can kill chicks despite vaccinations. We discovered that determining a baby chick’s gender is hardly foolproof, forcing us to re-home our hen Luisa, who turned out to be Luis.
Common predators include possums, foxes, raccoons and hawks that swoop down and fly away with smaller pullets when the chickens are out during routine coop cleanings.
We have even experienced hen homicide. Angry Bird fatally pecked her adult hen coop mate at the time. We have lost 15 chicks and hens since we started.
As parents, Tommy and I find this aspect of chicken rearing helpful in instilling in our children a sense of reality and connectedness to nature. The various ways chickens die show how the world works and allow us direct examples to explain the food chain, the interdependence of humans and animals, and the few similarities and vast differences between domestic and wild animals.
One morning in 2019, there was a silence when Tommy and I were making our coffee; absent was the normal chirping and chicken talk that fills the air. We had our coops properly elevated with two types of wire fencing around them. We thought we had constructed the Fort Knox of chicken living areas. Nevertheless, a raccoon had gotten in overnight. It appeared to have chewed through wiring and dug underground to create enough space to enter and attack the chickens. All five of our hens, including one of our original hens, Shake and Bake, were slaughtered. This raccoon wasn’t even hungry. They often hunt for “sport.”
The experience gave us pause, and we felt nearly every stage of grief. We weren’t ready to try raising chickens again until 2021.
Reza Sadeghy, 71, owner of Festival Floors & Remodeling in Gaithersburg, learned early to build a coop and run that are impenetrable. The large coop at his Rockville home is 8 feet wide by 20 feet long, and the attached run is 12 feet wide by 20 feet long. He bought dozens of hens in 2021 for his granddaughter, who was 2 years old at the time. She loves watching them when she visits, he says.
Sadeghy added automated watering and feeding systems, allowing him the luxury of traveling for weeks without worrying about providing for his hens. While he was constructing this state-of-the-art facility, he did lose a few chickens to possums and other predators, but he says he recognizes that it is also part of the circle of life. Nevertheless, his secure coop has nearly eliminated untimely losses and gives him and his hens a lot of peace.
“The most relaxing part of my day is when I walk out and into the coop and my girls come and greet me,” he says. “Hey Hey, my favorite black hen, hops up and sits on my lap. It is the best relaxation and therapy after a day of hard work.”
Jeff Schwartz, 52, of Brookeville, owns Ashton Manor Environmental, a landscape company, and is a “hobby farmer.” His 17-year-old daughter, Taryn, and 14-year-old son, Max, show sheep and goats at county and state fairs, and are active in 4-H.
Like Sadeghy, Schwartz has built a maximum-security coop for his 15 hens with automated watering and feeding systems. Unlike Sadeghy, Schwartz does not name his chickens. He appreciates the healthy eating that comes from the organic eggs his chickens produce and the exercise of packaging and selling eggs with his kids to his neighbors, but they are not pets to him.
“The chickens are just the chickens, and they serve as my composter since they consume so much of our family’s food waste,” Schwartz says.
Our son Union and his twin 2-year-old brothers, Bodhi and Coda, love feeding the chickens our food waste. Angry Bird runs right up to them when they come holding leftovers. Our boys also enjoy petting Mo’at and Neytiri since they are smaller and can be put on our laps. (We wash their hands thoroughly afterward to prevent disease transmission.)
As much as our hens serve a purpose as composters and egg providers, we treat our girls as pets just like our three dogs. Other than the occasional game of dog vs. chicken tag, the dogs and chickens leave each other alone. The dogs will roam the yard and keep predators out.
Montgomery County’s zoning ordinance regulates the placement of chicken coops. They must be in a backyard, at least 25 feet from a lot line and 100 feet from a dwelling on another lot, a restriction that largely prohibits townhouse residents from raising chickens.
The prospect of backyard chickens was very contentious in Rockville, but a divided city council voted in 2015 to establish rules allowing up to five hens on single family residences upon permit approval.
Gaithersburg also allows hens, up to six unless 200 feet from neighboring homes.
The state Agriculture Department requires flock registration, but according to Moyle at the University of Maryland Extension, the rule is hardly enforceable. He knows of several flocks in the state that are not registered.
Sadeghy, with a bounty of chickens in Rockville, says he has complied with county zoning ordinances but only recently learned that the city has a separate permitting system and a limit of five hens—and he is working on achieving compliance.
Rockville Police Lt. Kenneth Matney manages the city’s backyard chicken permitting process. Rockville has 26 permits currently issued for backyard chickens, up from 20 five years ago, he says.
However, he says, “We are pretty certain there are more than 26 chicken owners in the city.”
It is a chilly November afternoon, windier than most, and we are nearing dusk. Union, Bodhi and Coda are wearing their fur-lined Crocs and are chasing Angry Bird and feeding Mo’at and Neytiri. Coda is bossy, and he’s laughing while yelling, “No chickens, NO! Bad chickens!” as he tries to stop them from chasing him, the physically smallest of our human tribe. Bodhi is trying to pet and feed Mo’at at the same time, which turns into them playing ring-around-the-rosy, circling the chicken coops. Union is moping around.
A couple of weeks earlier we had found Loudy, the apparent victim of a hawk attack, in the corner of our chicken pen. We had left her and Angry Bird out of their coops for an hour to forage around the pen. We returned to find Angry Bird with claw marks on her back and Loudy slain.
Today, Union cries. “I miss Loudy,” he says. “I’m mad at the hawks.”
We hug and then walk to Angry Bird’s coop to check for eggs.
Jennifer Tepper is a freelance writer who lives in Rockville and Sparrows Point, Maryland, as well as New Mexico.
