Yard Birds: The Lives and Times of America's Urban Chickens

By Philip Levy

In 2009, the New Yorker declared chickens the "it bird" and heralded "the return of the backyard chicken." This honor occurred as, a host of American cities were changing their laws to allow chickens in residents’ backyards. Philip Levy, a sometime chicken keeper himself, mixes cultural history with husbandry to chronicle the weird and wonderful story of Americans’ urban chickens. From the streets of Brooklyn to council chambers in Albany to the beat of Key West’s Chicken Nuisance Patrol, yard birds are an important and growing part of American city life.

Part history, part travelogue, and part reportage, Yard Birds takes the reader on a tour-de-force journey across America, past and present, to profile its urban chickens housed in luxury coops or dying at yearly rituals. What emerges is a compelling picture of city chickens that can both serve as hipster status symbols and guarantee that the families keeping them have at least something to eat. Levy’s smart and entertaining investigation of the contemporary urban chicken craze reveals that poultry flocks were historically an integral part of America’s urban spaces; chickens have simply returned home now, some to very fancy roosts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9780813949666

Book preview

Cover Page for Yard Birds

Yard Birds

Yard Birds

The Lives and Times of America’s Urban Chickens

Philip Levy

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville & London

University of Virginia Press

© 2023 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2023

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Levy, Philip, author.

Title: Yard birds : the lives and times of America’s urban chickens / Philip Levy.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022040243 (print) | LCCN 2022040244 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813949659 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813949666 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Backyard chickens—United States—Anecdotes. | Backyard chickens—United States—History—Anecdotes. | Chickens as pets—United States—Anecdotes. | Chickens as pets—United States—History—Anecdotes. | Chickens—United States—Anecdotes. | Chickens—United States—History—Anecdotes. | Hens—United States—Anecdotes. | Hens—United States—History—Anecdotes.

Classification: LCC SF487.3 .L48 2023 (print) | LCC SF487.3 (ebook) | DDC 636.500973—dc23/eng/20220928

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040243

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040244

Cover image and illustrations at chapter openings from Allen and Ginter Cigarette Cards, Wikimedia Commons

Cover art: Plymouth Rock chicken

To the loving memory of Michelle M. Levy. Listen to the birds.

Contents

Introduction: Kiev’s Story

1. But . . . This Is a City

2. Hen Fever

3. Confinement and Banishment

4. Hipsters, Humor, Fashion, and Chickens

5. Touring the Coops

6. The Art of Food Security

7. Who Killed Colonel?

8. A Blessing in the Book of Life

9. Viruses Get the Last Word

Coda: Here to Stay

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Yard Birds

Introduction

Kiev’s Story

I got my first and favorite chicken from a friend about a decade ago. The bird was a six- or seven-week-old black Australorp. As their breed name suggests, these hearty, friendly, plump little birds were an Australian variation on imported English Black Orpingtons, crossbred with some other birds already making a colonizer’s antipodean home south of the equator. Breeders first showed their newly conjured up Australorps in the 1890s, and the strain was registered as an official breed in the 1920s. That is the arc for most chicken hybrids. Someone does a little mix and match with chicken DNA, through selective breeding of favorite specimens, and if the resulting birds have desirable traits and can hold onto them over a few generations, then a new breed is ready to be introduced to the world. Emphasized traits can vary depending on the needs and tastes of the breeder. Coloration, fancy plumage, meat weight, and, of course, egg production have been carefully bred and maintained by centuries of chicken hobbyists and farmers.

For ages, chickens have been providing the genetic material with which humans could play God, bending and blending life to our will and whim. Intentional breeding brought out all sorts of traits and created volumes full of chicken variations—big or small; white, russet, or all-black feathers; fluffy plumage or smooth; long legs or short; huge, floppy, bright-red combs or trim, upright ones; little spiky feathers on a head or extravagant long ones at the tail. Humans did it with dogs, too, though dogs and chickens stand alone; no other creature has been quite as susceptible to our experimentation. In time before memory, a wolf let a human get close enough to feed him, and a few millennia later, he was a tiny French bulldog with a respiratory condition and an inability to even reproduce without some person’s help.¹ Chickens had a similar experience. What was once some sort of small theropod dinosaur, eons before modern humans were even a glint in an early hominin’s eye, ended up as a creature taking a dust bath in a hen yard and unable to stop ovulating. Virtually all the chickens we see today are the result of this millennia-long living-art project. The original chickens hailed from somewhere in the South Pacific, but their malleable DNA, plentiful eggs, and tasty meat meant that their varied descendants eventually spread all over the world. Wherever people went, they took chickens with them, and all along the way, humans kept on selecting and breeding and breeding and selecting to create the birds they most wanted.²

My lone Australorp was the product of centuries of intentional design—a masterpiece of evolutionary systems that had long ago been harnessed and manipulated to enhance some traits and depress others. Everything about her represented a choice made somewhere back in her family tree, all the way back to the Ur-chicken under some Asian sun. Maintaining a breed requires constant attention. If the humans all vanished, and the chickens were left behind to do as they pleased and breed as their fancy led them, then evolution’s regular random process would take the reins from the breeders’ hands, and the species would before long return to showing a small set of the strongest variations. They would probably be red and russet and nimble like their oldest ancestors.

But humans are still creating new breeds and curating the old ones. Australorps have a guaranteed future because they are plump, friendly, good egg layers with beautiful black feathers that glisten with an oil-slick-like green sheen. They do not care to fly and cannot leap that high in the air. That makes them very popular city birds because their keepers do not want them hopping over fences and getting in neighbors’ yards. The people who first bred Australorps could not have imagined that this lovely, friendly bird with the U-shaped body profile would one day be a backyard favorite, but even the most careful breeding can produce unexpected outcomes.

So much history and genetics packed into a small bird. But poking at the ground for bugs, my Australorp seemed to be just a chicken and oblivious to her place in the age-old story of an interspecies relationship. When I went to fetch my family’s new hen from my friend’s yard, it took a bit of chasing before we caught her. A gang of little boys helped by staking out the yard’s corners and blocking all chicken escape routes. Trying to catch a chicken is an ancient ritual, a human activity out of time—something children have been doing the world over for ages. Once she had been cornered and caught, I took the bird home in a cardboard box on the back seat of my car—a less time-honored performance.

Kiev—for that was the darkly humored name we gave this little gray-legged Australorp—cowered in her box but was quiet and calm for the whole ride home. Once there, we put her in the tile-floored screen enclosure off the back of our small Florida house. She could not scratch, and we had to clean up her poop, but it was good enough for the time being. We piled up some boxes to make an impromptu coop for her and trusted that for a night or two, at least, Kiev could sleep safe and screened in from the various raptors, snakes, crocodilians, felines, canines, and marsupials that no doubt wanted to bite her like a pit bull wants to go after a bait dog. She slept happily in her cardboard coop, hunkering down until she was a dark, warm, moist ball of softly breathing life. During the day, she walked around the enclosure as if she had always been there. When we let her out into the larger yard, she explored it in relaxed silence. She almost instantly came to understand that the screen enclosure was her safe place, and all we had to do was open the door and she would come running over. She created a yard routine and stuck to it without fail. She had no interest in leaving and made no attempt to bolt—she wanted food and some safety, and she was getting both in our yard.

Things were less smooth, though, on the human side of the story. Like most other first-time chicken keepers, we had no idea what we were getting into. Growing up in New York City did not leave me with a lot of firsthand experience with live chickens. As far as I can recall, the only living hen I ever saw was in a plastic cage in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The poor bird stood on a wire mesh that was rigged to a small electrical device. A quarter dropped into the machine started the current, and the shocked chicken would jump uncomfortably to get away from the voltage. A sign above the cage advertised The Dancing Chicken. It was animal cruelty at its purest, and even though the cage and bird were there, I think most people had already lost their taste for such gratuitous inflicting of pain. It almost goes without saying that, like many other city chicken keepers, my little family did not have much experience to fall back on.

But with a live bird in the yard, we had to learn quickly about nutrition and seek the city stores that sold the right kind of feed. The screened porch was a short-term measure. Kiev needed a place that she could call her own, so I did what scores of other neophyte chicken keepers had done: I googled chicken coop design and got to work. I built an A-frame type of structure in plywood, framing lumber, and chicken wire. It was a two-story affair based on examples I had seen online. On the top was a space large enough that Kiev, and a few more hens if it came to that, would be able to stand happily inside, high and dry and far from snakes and other dangers. A gentle ramp led down to a nice patch of ground, all screened in for more protection. The coop was clean and solid but also had a bit of a bunker vibe—if we could have rigged it with spotlights and anti-raccoon alarms, we would have. But for Kiev, it was home, and she attached to it as quickly as she had to the screen enclosure. She always came running to the coop’s door after a long day of scratching for bugs and exploring the endlessly intriguing patch of ginger plants in our yard. In the morning, we would hear her softly cooing or making a distinctive chook chook chook chook sound we called motoring for its resemblance to an old idling engine. Sometimes motoring was a prelude to a be-gaw crow that was meant to say, It’s daytime, and even though you all are still sleeping or doing something else, I nevertheless am eager to get out in the yard and explore, so come open the coop’s door so I can get about my business, please. Now! The crowing was never all that loud—nothing near as loud as the table saw (or whatever it is) that one of our neighbors uses most afternoons. But we did not want Kiev to be a nuisance. We were learning to love her, but she was a clandestine guest, an illegal tenant, a fugitive bird in a city that had no law to protect her. Countless thousands of birds across the land live under the radar in just this way, although their numbers are dwindling as more and more cities see the value of backyard chickens. But Kiev was illegal, so we were always quick to let her loose in the yard, happy and quiet, before her motoring turned to be-gawing and she blew her cover.

It was not long before she gave us her first egg, or at least the first one in the coop’s straw. I later found out that she had left a few in secret spots in the yard before we knew to look for them. Eggs are always cited as one of the main incentives for keeping backyard chickens. Most keepers find that they come for the eggs but stay for the friendly and engaging pets. The desire for clean and local eggs has been a driving force in the last few decades’ worth of campaigns to change laws to allow birds like Kiev to come out of hiding. The backyard egg, in its way, is a symbol of all that is fresh and clean and local in food. Everything you might have heard about fresh eggs being better than store-bought ones is absolutely true. The raw whites hold together much better than those of less fresh eggs, and the yokes are a deep yellow, almost orange. Commercial eggs look watery and pale in comparison. The backyard egg’s flavor is strong and rich without being gamey. It is hard to go back to grocery store eggs after getting used to fresh ones—even the best free-range eggs still fall short.

The problem is quantity. A hen is only going to lay one egg a day, and even that is an ordeal for her system; she will take breaks at intervals over a few years before her capacity to make eggs at all just stops. If a city keeper wants birds only for the eggs, they are in for a tough lesson at the end of a hen’s productive term. In ideal conditions, a hen can live for as many as a dozen years, only a few of which will see egg-laying. Getting a chicken is less practical than its press might make it seem. If a person or family wants more eggs, though, there will have to be more birds, and an increase of birds strains the discussion around keeping backyard chickens. One egg is a novelty, but seeking a regular supply represents a fundamental rethink of what a city backyard is and can be, and that rethink leads to conflict over just what is the purpose and meaning of an American backyard.

Kiev generally laid her eggs at about ten in the morning. On her laying days, she stayed in her coop a bit longer than she might otherwise. Sometimes she would do a short patrol of the yard, scratch up a bug or two, and then go back to the roost. We knew that if we did not see her wandering in the morning, an egg was soon to follow. She liked her privacy and did not want to be bothered while engaged in the act, so we left her to it. The resulting egg was always special, like a magical little gift from a friend; she was the pet who gave us groceries. The eggs were always reliably edible too. Since there was no rooster on hand to fertilize them, each egg was just yoke and white in a brown shell—no potential for life. It was almost as if Kiev knew this because she never seemed to care that we took the eggs—no instinct to protect the next generation of Black Australorps kicked in. She usually just laid her egg and went back into the yard.

She scratched a few dust baths here and there, but her presence was more benefit to the yard than harm. The feed seed that she missed in her pecking either drew other wild birds to the yard or became lush green grass—fertilized by chicken poop. She loved a good dust bath and would sit low in her little dirt pool and flick the grit all over her back and wings and then rub it all around. This process created a sort of impromptu sandpaper that would scratch away all the irritating mites and fleas. She also performed something we called chicken yoga. She would find a nice clear spot and gracefully push one wing forward while extending the opposite leg back in a long stretch. Then she would repeat the dance with the other wing and foot. It was remarkable. Other times she would get mysteriously spooked and run across the yard, flapping her wings.

Our lives and needs gradually became intertwined. At night, when the infamous Florida palmetto bugs came into the house to scurry across the floor, I would use an empty yogurt cup to corral the two-inch-long roach beasts. I used to hate seeing them, but with Kiev in the yard, I was not happy unless at least two or three made an appearance. Kiev came to know that on many a morning, there would be a small insectile treat for her inside the house, so she would pace back and forth at the back door until I let her in. Sometimes she would get impatient and peck the glass door to remind me of our bargain. Once inside, she would race over to the nearest yogurt cup and wait patiently until I, like a master chef lifting a silver cloche tray cover, would reveal the still-living tasty treat beneath, and voilà, bon appétit, mademoiselle.

Sometimes she would run up to one of us and just stand at our feet. We would pick her up and cradle her like the pet she was, and while we slowly stroked her head, her eyes would close, and she would coo softly. Like any creature, she just wanted love and contact from the other creatures with whom she shared her world.

It was a happy life she led with us, but short.

One morning, the yard was quiet. No motoring. No be-gawing. Just an unusual silence—one we had not heard since before Kiev came into our lives. I went into the yard, nervous to see what the problem might be. I found my worst fears confirmed.

We would never know what sort of beast it was who broke into the coop. Snake, raccoon, possum—it could have been any one of them, or perhaps one of the other animals that, all on their own, have mastered the art of cohabiting in cities with humans. We had lost our Kiev, though. A friend consoled me with a sad bit of wisdom: Never give your heart to an animal that so many others want to eat.³

---

This book is about birds like our dear Kiev. What follows is a journey through the world of America’s urban chickens, past and present. It is part history, part travelogue, and part reportage. We will look at the fancy chicken crazes of the 1850s and the early 2000s. We will see how chickens came to be banished from cities, and we will explore what it means for a bird to be fashionable. We will catalogue the types of coops city people build, and we will look into the commodities in the growing urban chicken marketplace. We will consider what happens when live chickens become part of religious rituals on city streets and what happens when they are part of secret prize fights. We will also reflect on the implications of a global pandemic for urban chicken keepers.

What follows is not a how-to manual, although readers will certainly learn some tips and gain some insights on how to keep—or not to keep—their own city flocks. Nor is this book a comprehensive look at the history either of the chicken itself or of the long and complicated human-chicken relationship. We will see how the actual biological history of chickens was, in very important ways, a city story, and we will see how changes in understandings regarding human biology forced chickens out of town. But I am not telling a full-scale history of the chicken as a species.⁴ The following chapters also are not a study of chickens as commercial food products or as the subjects of recipes. Most of the writing on chickens has focused on those two issues in particular—so much so that what often begins as a species history rapidly becomes a depressing tale of factory-farming horrors and genetic mutations all designed to serve the dietary needs of the birds’ human devourers. Truly the stuff of nightmares. So, no recipes and no extended excursions into the world of mass chicken production.⁵

There also are very few chicken jokes. I am pretty much done with all of them. People tend to laugh at the mention of chickens, and I still do not really understand why. It’s worse in writing. Whenever chickens come up, most writers cannot resist the urge to dip into a large trough of stale jokes about chickens and the road, for example. Tastes Like Chicken is Emelyn Rude’s history of the birds whose title riffs on the often-quoted claim about esoteric meats. Andrew Lawler’s Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? offers an answer to his version of perhaps the best-known animal joke ever told. Other titles like How to Speak Chicken, The Secret Lives of Chickens, and Big Chicken all pull a sort of bait and switch by dropping in chicken where something seemingly more respectable should be. There is virtually a bookshelf groaning under the weight of self-help titles offering Chicken Soup for the Souls of anything from Teenagers to Nurses. The reference is of course to the much-discussed healing powers of water in which a chicken has been boiled, and its notorious association with Jewish motherhood.

Headline writers also can’t restrain themselves when discussing the often contentious politics of city chicken ordinances: City Chicken Flap Takes Wing (2010); No Cause to Squawk about Chickens (2011); In Albany, the Chickens Won’t Be Home to Roost (2011); Pecking at the Albany Backyard Chicken Issue (2011); Albany Takes Another Peck at Backyard Chickens (2019); Albany Hatches New Plan to Allow Chickens in the City (2019).⁶ Food writers cannot pass up any lurking double entendre as attested by titles like Fifty Shades of Chicken and 50 Ways to Eat Cock and 50 Cocks That Won’t Disappoint. Popular entertainments from the cartoon bombast Foghorn Leghorn to the movie Chicken Run have long presented chickens as comical characters—and for city people unfamiliar with the actual live birds, these imagined chickens fill in the gaps in the imagination. What is more, the very idea of chickens in cities has been lampooned many times including in television comedies such as The Kids in the Hall, Seinfeld, and Friends. All this levity too often obscures or demeans the rather serious role chickens have played over time. One of my goals is to make people think twice before laughing at chickens—or at least to leave them as mystified about the laughter as I am. I hope readers who do not already, will come to see chickens as being at the center of something serious and inquiry-worthy, and that their presence in cities in particular is neither odd nor harmful.

Humans are city dwellers. The United Nations estimates that 55 percent of the earth’s humans live in cities—UN experts project that at current rates of growth, that number will be 68 percent in thirty years. That will be close to 6.6 billion people. Right now, we are at about 4.2 billion city folks, and there already is a housing shortage.⁷ The year 1920 was the first time a United States census showed that a majority of Americans lived in cities—albeit some of these cities’ populations were as small as 10,000 people. Researchers at the University of Michigan estimate that a staggering 83 percent of Americans now live in what they call urban areas. That is up from 64 percent in 1950.⁸ Forget about cowboys and farmers; real Americans are strap hangers, or, if they drive to work, they are good parallel parkers. We live in a citified world, but if we are going to make it work for us in an era of ever-hotter temperatures, we are going to have to rethink some of the things that might have made sense once upon a time but no longer do.

People can laugh at a live chicken in a city, but that laughter is a new phenomenon and is a trend that I don’t think will last all that long. Urban chickens are not going to save us, but their presence in cities is one tendril of the trends that just might. That might be a lot to lay on the shoulders of poor Kiev and the countless birds like her—a lot to ask of birds who mostly want to peck for bugs and take dust baths between naps. But if we are to get anywhere, we are going to need a lot of friends.

Chapter 1

But . . . This Is a City

In the fall of 2017, a small Florida city was in the midst of a mayoral election. It was nothing special. A local favorite with obvious larger political ambitions was up against two candidates: a newcomer and a mysterious third person who ran no campaign, attended no forums, yet in the end garnered nearly 12 percent of the vote. Go figure.

One mini debate event took place at a still-under-renovation coffee shop. About two dozen people came out to discuss the city’s pressing issues and to see how the candidates would interact and answer questions. One candidate—the one who won—was well connected and polished far beyond the demands of her office aspiration. Her smile and prefab empathy were as practiced as her answers. The slickness itself felt untrustworthy. It was almost no surprise, therefore, when some curious reporters later discovered she had lied about having a doctorate and two master’s degrees and her short political career blew up in her face. It was quite a dramatic tale of hubris, karma, and good journalism. This is why Florida has the reputation it does.¹

The other candidate was a tall, genial gent who had submitted his name long before he knew just who his main opponent would be. His manner made clear that he was well aware he was appearing that night as an also-ran. He did his best to keep up appearances while we all hoped he had not sunk too much money into his forlorn hope of a campaign.

The questions at the coffeehouse ran the gamut of the city’s many woes. How would the candidates deal with the massive debt the town could not handle? What plans had they for bringing in new businesses? What would they do about this or that streetlight or area of broken pavement? How would they fix our troubled schools? All were pro forma, the kinds of questions that anyone could ask any candidate running for any office in any small town in any state in any election cycle. Generica shaded by palm trees and live oaks—and no coffee.

Then the interesting thing happened. The chicken question finally came up.

For years, a small group of citizens had been pushing to change the city’s long-standing ordinance that made it impossible (well, illegal at any rate) for residents to keep chickens in their backyards. The discussion was often under the radar—the movement lacked a face and a spokesperson. It was a thing of whispers and confidential chats, since many of the people most interested in changing the law were, at the same time, violating it. People didn’t want to call attention to themselves and their birds. Small coops with small flocks were actually hiding out all over the place—one could walk on many a street and hear the telltale cooing. The problem, of course, was that code breakers didn’t advertise their code breaking.

Social media changed that a bit, though. From their keyboards, one by one, people began to open a discussion about the town’s underground chickens. Soon it became something of a local issue, with strong partisans—very strong sometimes—on each side. The arguments in favor of the birds touched on a variety of issues. In fact, they were in most respects no different from those invoked in other towns all over the nation that have been having the same discussions for the past decade. Chickens meant fresh eggs. They were pets who provided groceries and ate up table scraps. They were charming little birds who made a house feel like a home. All of the prochicken arguments clustered around an idealization of home; the domestic economy; safe, clean, and close food; and a broader environmental outlook. The chicken was a living symbol of household autonomy in a time of changing climate and ways of life. For many, daily engagement with interspecies cooperation was a vital part of what the future needed to be. In fact, chicken advocates had been making arguments exactly like this all across the nation since the 1960s. But in the early 2000s, what became known as the backyard chicken movement gathered steam. In city after city, long-standing legal obstacles to chicken keeping toppled. By 2017, allowing chickens to live in city yards had become so commonplace that keeping them illegal seemed a little behind the times.

But that did not mean that there was unanimity about the benefits of backyard birds. Wherever citizens sought to change laws, there were also opponents who voiced their own set of repeating arguments. For them, the birds were noisy nuisances. They would bring pests, their feces would spread contagion, their eggs would lure raccoons, and if they broke free, they would scratch up carefully manicured flower beds or golf course greens. All of these were valid concerns, but most of them could be addressed by passing a well-written law.

Almost all of the newly hatched city-chicken laws specifically stated that roosters were not welcome. That alone silenced the core of the noise objection, and although hens vocalize, too, they were never any louder than a dachshund who just spotted the postman, and no one was making the case for banning little yappy dogs. Health concerns, though, could not be simply legislated out of existence. Those who wanted to argue that chickens presented a small but real health risk could point to a number of studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has