Home: www.ottawaherald.com Franklin County, Kansas, USA   
HOME NEWS SPORTS COMMUNITY ENTERTAINMENT SHOP Lifestyles Classifieds Business Finder Jobs Autos Homes
Mobile Edition
Day-Night, Moon Phases

Suggest a poll topic
News-A01

2009-11-21


-A01

2009-11-18


Special-A01

2009-11-05


USA Weekend
Saturday, October 31, 2009 10:00 AM

LINTNER: There’s no claws for alarm

By AUDREY LINTNER, Blooming Dells

I never thought I’d see the day when chickens would be the focus of news investigations and hot debate. Gas prices, sure. The guilt or innocence of an accused individual, certainly. But chickens? The goofy bug-eaters of my childhood?

I remember how we got started in keeping chickens. A neighbor gave my sister and me a couple of roosters: Little Red for me and the Old Man for Karen. Being advanced enough to know that two roosters do not equal profits in the egg market, we acquired some hens and thus our motley flock was born.

Bear in mind, this was in the California suburbs rather than rural Kansas. There are plenty of similarities, but also a world of difference in the raising of chickens in these places.

In both Kansas and California, you have the benefit of fresh eggs on a regular basis. There is nothing like sitting down to breakfast and enjoying an egg that was grass yesterday. There’s also the fun of watching a group of animals with personalities as distinctive as any reality show subjects.

There was Cinnamon, an amiable and thoroughly cross-eyed brown hen. She enjoyed roosting in trees and eating ham rinds. Her unfortunate visual difficulty meant that she occasionally missed the rind and snagged a piece of your hand, but she was a kindly soul. One of our most distinctive hens was Vampira, an orange-eyed silver hen with a wicked nesting instinct. You had to move like lightning to get one of her eggs.

My personal favorite was my own Little Red, a Bantam with a taste for ice cream. He’d ride the handle bars of my bike while we cruised town after the ice cream trucks. Kids in the neighborhood invariably would want to pet Red and offer him bites of their ice pops.

Of course, not all is fun and games with chickens. For one thing, they’re terrible at playing marbles. For another, they require a lot of care. Fresh food and clean water are daily musts, and the henhouse needs regular cleaning. Chicken droppings release ammonia, which can burn a chicken’s eyes and cause respiratory damage. These same droppings also make great fertilizer for peach trees, we discovered.

Even production chickens deserve the same treatment as a pet. Food, shelter, care and protection are universal needs. Here in Kansas, there’s the bitter cold of winter to contend with. We also have predators like raccoons and coyotes, and rats and mice that love a free meal of corn. A stout fence, a sharp eye and some common sense will go a long way to keeping your flock healthy and happy.

We didn’t have much of a mouse problem in California, but we did have other kinds of “pests.” Drop-ins and drop-offs. The occasional passerby would think, “Oh, look. Chickens!” and walk right into our yard for a closer look. Big no-no, kids. We also had anonymous donations — birds nobody wanted would be dropped into our henyard overnight. We wound up with a rather vicious rooster that way. He was tasty.

I don’t remember a single complaint from the neighbors over our chickens. What I do remember is learning responsibility and enjoying the company of some truly fine feathered friends. Oh, and the fresh eggs, of course. Have a great weekend, everybody.

E-mail Audrey Lintner at gardenherald@hotmail.com

E-mail this story to a friend | Print this article |
Enjoy the convenience of home delivery of The Ottawa Herald.
Check out this blog by clicking now.

  HOME NEWS SPORTS COMMUNITY ENTERTAINMENT SHOP   Business Finder Contact Jobs Autos Homes Classifieds  
Copyright © 2007 The Ottawa Herald, MediaSpan, and MarketAide Services, Inc.