Episode: 642
Title: HPR0642: Hacking Your Suburban Backyard with Chickens
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0642/hpr0642.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:19:01

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Hello, this is Brother Mouse, I'm back with a second show for Hacker Public Radio, and
this one is about hacking your suburban backyard with chickens, and that might not seem to
be a normal topic for hacker types, but I'd like to make the case that chickens are
some kind of biological blue code that holds together and improves the other processes
that are already happening in your backyard.
To start out, let's make a brief run at some of the benefits that you can get from having
chickens running around in your backyard.
Let's address first the thing that comes to most people's mind, which is egg production.
Yes, your birds will lay eggs in the backyard, and you can pick them up every day and take
them in and eat them or give them away or whatever you want to do with them.
For me, the eggs are a nice site benefit.
I enjoy them.
I had a hard boiled egg this morning for breakfast.
Sometimes when I go to work, I take an egg sandwich, of course I bake with the eggs that
come from the birds also.
I would say you're not going to save any money having chicken still eggs.
You might save money if you were buying organic, free-range chicken eggs, whole foods or something
like that.
It might be cheaper than that, but in general you're not going to save a lot of money with eggs.
The benefit is you know where the eggs came from, particularly with things like the recent
Salmonella scare and things like that.
You know the conditions that your birds are in.
You know exactly how the egg was treated from the time it came out of the chicken's body
and into your pan and into your own body, so you have full control over that.
The last bit is about the treatment of the birds themselves.
I'm not a big tree hugger or bunny hugger or anything like that.
Here you've seen how happy chickens appear to be running around the backyard.
It's hard to get fired up and optimistic about the lives that those battery hands have when
they're in the little cages.
So while they're running around the backyard, they are constantly eating bugs and weeds
and little bits of anything out of the yard.
I mean they'll just spend 90% of their day walking around and scratching the ground and pecking
bugs out of the yard and eating them.
Don't be alarmed if you see them eating small rocks.
You may have noticed that chickens have no teeth and they store rocks in their gizzard and
that's how they effectively chew their food.
If you've ever gone to a chicken joint and bought some fried gizzards and you notice that
they're kind of butterfly, the reason a butterfly is that they have to cut the gizzard open
at the factory and get the rocks out and they have to de-rock the chickens.
Next benefit is that chickens will mow your grass and this isn't immediately obvious
to most people but chickens will walk around and snip the top off of the grass blades.
We'll talk a little bit later about chicken tractors and my wife and I move our chicken
tractor every few days because the chickens will chew the grass down to cut level and
they will move them and let them eat other grass, get some fresh grass in them.
If you have any areas of just plain dirt like you have a garden or whatever that the birds
will get in there and they'll prefer to scratch around in that dirt and they're effectively
telling your garden for free so not only are they debugging it but they're also telling
you have your garden.
It's got a couple more benefits I'll share with you.
The next one is something you might not think of as a benefit but they generate really
high quality manure to go in your compost pile.
It's probably the best source of nitrogen that you could put in your compost pile.
It really super charges the compost which you can turn back to your garden and the summer
well everything but winter.
I put chicken poop in the compost and move their bedding out and scrape it up off of
whatever and throw it in the compost pile and rotate as normal.
The winter when there's no plant in my garden because they all froze, I move the chicken
tractor directly over the garden area and the birds can poop directly into the garden and
it'll have time to break down and not be so hot as they say by springtime.
The last thing here I want to mention is one of the chicken benefits is that they're just
funny.
They're just funny little creatures.
It's just like having little fluffy velociraptor things running around in the backyard.
Their mannerisms are funny.
They have personal traits, personalities if you will.
I don't know if they looked exactly the same if they all had the same markings.
You could still tell the birds apart because they just behave differently.
They're just amusing to watch.
There's a term for this and it's called chicken TV and it's a thing where people rather
than watching HBO or whatever will just go out and sit in the backyard with their wives
or kids or husbands or whatever and just watch the chicken's dig and scratch in the dirt.
It's very relaxing and funny.
To be balanced I should talk about some real or imagined drawbacks of having chickens in
your backyard.
The first one that comes to mind and I would say that almost everyone I talk to about
chickens brings this up immediately which is that legal and the answer is usually yes.
Most places you can have chickens in your suburban yard but there are places with laws against
it.
In the show notes a link to where you can go check and see whether or not birds are
allowed in your city.
For cities that do have laws regarding chickens the most common rule is no roosters.
Roosters make a lot of noise early in the morning and most people don't like that and you don't
need them to get eggs.
The bird is going to ovulate and lay her egg every 25 hours or so and the rooster being
there not isn't going to make a difference.
The only difference it would make is that the egg would be fertilized if the rooster was
a Johnny on the spot but since you're probably not growing chickens to breed then that's
not really an issue for you.
Some locations have rules about how far away from buildings that chicken dwellings have
to be in and you know 50 feet away from a house or from a fence or whatever and so that
will be another benefit of using what's called a chicken tractor that we'll talk about
a little bit later.
I know I've mentioned it before.
The next drawback or misconception that I'll bring up is the level of noise that hens
make.
Hens are generally pretty quiet.
Even the chicks are pretty quiet.
They make peeping sounds and that's why they call them peepers.
They kind of go peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, like that until they get several
weeks old and then they start to their voices change and they start to sound like chickens.
The hens tend to be fairly quiet.
They kind of talk amongst themselves while they're out and about eating bugs and things
like that and I'll stop here for just a second and throw in a few seconds of sound clips
of the chickens just eating.
And in that case the mic was close enough to the chickens that you can actually hear them
picking up the individual seeds and things like that that they were eating so that gives
you an idea for the level of volume there.
They can make noise.
The traditional time that hens make more noise is after they lay an egg.
It's called the egg song and normally lasts about 60 seconds and that's normally when
you would hear your chickens or more importantly your neighbors might hear your chickens.
And you know it's the kind of stereotypical chicken sound where they bark, bark, bark,
that kind of thing.
If you anger a chicken you can also get some sounds out of it and those sounds are very
dinosaur-like.
I want to put in a little clip here of a chicken from this morning.
I went out to, I opened up the egg door to get the eggs out and there was a chicken still
sitting on it.
She was in the middle of laying and she was not happy that I had opened the door and so
she made this sound.
And that sounds just like a dinosaur to me, I don't know about you but in your rate it
wasn't loud.
If you weren't standing right there you wouldn't have heard it but that's another sound that
chickens can make.
And that's can eat part of your garden.
Usually they only eat the shoots so that if you keep them out of the garden until you
know the plants are foot tall or whatever then normally they won't destroy what's left.
Although it's up to your chickens, I mean they could be garden destroyers or not.
It just depends on the batch that you've got.
Mine are fairly typical and that they will only pick it something it's an inch or two
tall and if it's bigger than that they won't pick at it unless it's got a bug on it.
If it's got a bug on it they'll actually eat caterpillars and stuff off of you know
your tomato vine.
The next thing that people think about chickens is that they smell bad which is not true.
Chickens have a smell, they smell like chickens just like your dog smells like a dog or
your cat smells like a cat but you know if you're taking care of the animal and taking
care of the litter box you know they don't have an egregious smell.
Same with chickens.
The sharp ammonia smell that people associate with chicken coops is just bad hygiene.
That's just a situation where the chickener, the person is not cleaning out the coop and
is building up big piles of what you know like back want to type a deal and it starts
to break down into ammonia whereas you know normally what you do is once a week or however
often you go out there and removing the excess and throw in your compost bin and do that
kind of thing keeps from building up.
So another benefit of having a chicken tractor that we'll talk about a little bit is that
you're continually moving it so even if there is some that gets down on the ground it's
being evenly distributed across your yard.
Okay let's talk about chicken housing for a little bit.
I want to start with the chicken housing instead of the birds themselves because right
now if you're listening to this near the time I recorded it it's still winter and this
would be a perfect time to start building some chicken housing so that by the time spring
rolls around you've got the kinks worked out and you're not running around in a panic
trying to find a place to put your chickens.
So a couple of different main ways of housing your chickens the first traditional way is
the chicken coop.
The chicken coop is usually a large shed sized object usually big enough for you to walk
in.
The benefits of that design would be first of all that you're going to walk into it.
I mean you're going to walk in there and grab the eggs.
You can sit with the chickens if you wanted that kind of thing indoors.
The downside is that it usually requires more scrap lumber to make just because it's bigger.
It may be so big that it can be visible over your fence and you know maybe someone from
the city says you have to have a permit to build a building or something.
So downside is that it's in one place all the time and you know if the city comes by
and says well you need to be 75 feet away from a fence line now you've got this you know
structure that you've built and you may not be able to move it easily.
Also you know all the manure and everything is happening at one place so it may be a
little bit tougher to keep clean and spiffy smelling.
The other way to approach this and it's gaining more popularity in the last few years is what's
called a chicken tractor and it's basically as much smaller than a coop and it tends to
be portable by either one or two people.
If it's portable by two people it has handles coming out of both sides so that you and your
partner will you know go out every few days and pick it up by the handles and just move
over a few feet and set it back down.
The other version that's operable by one person normally has handles in one end and wheels
on the other like a wheelbarrow kind of and you pick it up and roll it to the new location
and set it down and that means that you know the chickens are over fresh grass, fresh ground
all the time and then you know poop that comes off the rooster whatever and lands on the
ground is being evenly distributed around your yard.
You may not be able to pick it all up and so it just kind of evenly fertilizes your yard.
The tractors most of them are little either square or a frames and the chickens will normally
live upstairs and they'll be like an open air chicken wired area downstairs where they
can run around on the bottom and then normally chicken tractors are relatively small so you
let the birds out to free range at least part of the day.
In the beginning we let our birds free range about an hour a day and now I would say they're
out most of the day.
All right inside your chicken tractor you'll have feeding and watering containers and
for our little micro flock like we're talking about you know you can probably get by with
a gallon waterer and a gallon feeder and then you know a purine up chicken chow or what
have you own your local feed store or tractor supply will have chicken feeding put in there
no big deal.
All right so let's say that across the winter you've been putting together scrap that you've
seen beside the road and whatever kind of stuff you can get free and donated and you've
started putting your coop or chicken tractor together.
By the way I spent about twenty dollars on mine.
I had to buy the hinge hardware for my doors there's two different doors on mine and
I bought chicken wire staples they look like you know big fencing staples and also the
actual chicken wire itself so I've at twenty bucks maybe.
But let's say that it's springtime and you've got a little scrappy chicken coop or tractor
set up and you're ready for some birds let's talk about how you might get your birds
there's three different ages of birds that you will normally find for sale.
The first and most common is chicks in other words they're one or two days old.
Chickens are precoachal birds which is to say that they're not fed by their parents I
mean they come out of the out of the egg and for the first day or so they live on the
remnants of the yoke sack but then after that they just start walking around eating things
off the ground so they don't require the presence of a mother in any normal sense.
You will have to regulate their heat and we'll talk about that just a second.
Couple common places to find baby chicks you might find them at a flea market at feed
stores traditionally in the spring we'll have big boxes full of little chicks running
around peeping and you can pick out your favorites and take them home.
You can buy them from a hatchery.
The hatcheries believe it or not male first class male boxes of chicks places and normally
since it's being done in the cooler spring normally they pack you know twenty twenty
four little chicks together in a box and ship them to you that way normally twenty birds
is too many for one person so sometimes people get together and you know two or three
of them will split up box of baby chicks and share the cost and the postage that way.
Remember that they don't eat anything for a while after they hatch because they're
still living on stored food so that's why it's not why they're not starving or anything
inside of the box while they can get shipped to you.
When you do get baby chicks they'll either be called sexed or straight run sexed means
that they have been to the best of someone's ability sorted by gender it's really hard
to do chickens don't have genitalia and any normal sense of the word so the people at
the hatcheries and places like that are fairly skilled and they can get about ninety percent
correct so you can expect that you'll be getting about ninety percent females and some
accidents that you'll have to figure out what to do with you might name them stew and
eat them later on when it grows up and starts to crow or you know if you live off on your
own somewhere there's no neighbors around maybe you can have a rooster or you can donate
my crakes list what have you.
Straight run chicks are basically just hatched chicks and that they have not made an attempt
to sex them so those are going to be fifty fifty fifty fifty females and males from most
people that's not a successful way to go because you have to deal with getting rid of a
whole bunch of roosters at some point.
Now there is an interesting hack in that some baby chicks have markings or colors that
have been bred into them based on their chromosomes so that male chicks and female chicks physically
look different in other words one of them might be black and one of them is yellow or in
one case it has a spot on its head and the other one does not.
And so in those cases if you buy females you can be assured that you're getting females
because the males just look different there.
So let's say you want to go the day old chick route and pick them up from the local feed
store before you bring them home I would say a day or two before you'll need to put together
a brooder and brooder basically you've heard the term that a hen goes broody or a hen
broods and it means basically to sit on to spread it wings out and just keep baby chicks
warm so although the chicks don't need food from the hen they do need heat and so a lot
of times what people do is use like a giant rubber made bin a pretty big one not a small
one but I mean like a pretty big one a few feet long and put some bedding in the bottom
of it and then hang a drop light over it and on one end and the drop light provides heat
for the animals and depending on how old they are they'll maybe start off at 95 degrees
or whatever and as they get older they require less and less external heat.
One of the neat things about raising the day old chicks is that they will self regulate
their distance from the heat source to keep themselves comfortable so for example if
they are cold they'll walk closer to the heat source and lay down to sleep and if they're
too hot they'll get up and they'll walk away so they tend to distribute themselves around
the heat source in this kind of chicken histogram so you can just look down and see the
data on who's cold and hot based on their position away from the heat source it's really
pretty funny while they're inside the breeder you'll traditionally use some little chick
feeders and they just screw on adapters that go on the bottom of a mason jar little chicks eat
starter crumbles and it's a it's a similar makeup although different in protein and things
like that it's similar to what the older chickens eat but it's not in big pellets that would
be too big for them it kind of looks like grape nuts sized maybe and that's what the little chicks
eat out of the little adapters that fit on the mason jars no big no big deal just change that out
once a day at some point they'll become big enough to take out of the out of the breeder and be
on their own out there in your chicken coop or chicken tractor and you'll know when that time comes
because you'll be sick of having them inside and listening to them peep and having to change
their bedding at all the time and you know they started to learn how to fly and you open the top
up and they go flying around the room or whatever so after the chicks are big enough to be
out of the breeder but before they hit point of lay and point of lay means the time when they
start laying eggs they're called Pulitz P-U-L-L-E-T-S so the Pulitz will be outdoors and they will
as they get closer and closer to point of lay they will start eating actual laying feed
well I feed my birds Purina it's called Layina L-A-Y-E-N-A but they eat other stuff as well
they don't really care and of course they eat bugs out of the yard as well now you can actually
buy Pulitz so if you're looking for some young birds that are almost ready to lay you can look
in the one-ads under Pulitz of whatever breed you want and you can buy them now they cost more
than the chicks the chicks are like two or three bucks a piece maybe and the Pulitz are maybe ten
fifteen bucks I'm just guessing here but they'll be ready to lay shortly and you don't actually
have to wait you know four or five months for the delay another benefit of buying a Pulitz
is that you can know that it's not a rooster or you can be pretty dang sure that it's not a rooster
because normally by the time they're that old a rooster would have started to crow and would also
start having the sexual secondary sexual characteristics a rooster that kind of the pretty feathers
on the rear and saddle feathers and a much larger comb usually in waddles than the hands you can
also buy a laying hen once the Pulitz starts to lay eggs she becomes a hen so you can actually buy
hands as well normally I would search for laying hands although it's kind of a strange situation
because normally people don't sell productive hands in other words unless they're getting out
of the backyard chicken business or just ended up with too many or have one that the other ones
don't like most people don't give up an egg producing hen so just keep that in mind now there are
places particularly in England I think where people do a lot of battery hen rescue in other words
after the hens start to slow down at the end of two years or whatever then they're normally
slaughtered by the big companies but in England a lot of people rescue them it's called battery hen
rescue now there is one other option for getting hold of chickens but it's not for beginners and
that would be to buy fertilized eggs but you would have to have it requires some more advanced
techniques you would have to have a incubator and you know turn the eggs and and all that kind of
thing and so it's probably more than what a brand new chickener would want to get involved with
but that is a possibility there are people who do it that way I would say that the eggs themselves
that have not hatched or maybe a bucket piece all right so now we've got our coop built and we've
decided what age of chickens we want to get the next and perhaps the most difficult decision
is the breed that you want before we start talking about specific breeds I'll say that there are
general categories that the birds fall into the first category would be egg producing birds
I don't mean just that they lay eggs because all chickens will lay eggs that's how chickens get
more chickens but that breeds that have been bred for years for their egg production will produce
more eggs bigger eggs and more consistently a example of this kind of bird would be a legrin
if you look at it in writing it looks like leg horn but chicken people say legrin that kind of
chicken is renowned for just pumping out eggs like pretty much one a day there there is a downside
to some of those birds and that it is that legrins in particular and some of the other egg producing
birds tend to be flyty is the word and it means kind of noisy skittish and they can actually fly
so they could like leave your area and be gone so unless you had a big enclosed
coop you might have a problem with those and they may be loud enough that your neighbors would
complain next kind of bird is a meat bird most backyard people don't do chickens for meat
just because they don't want to get into the slaughter business I would warn you that unless
you are trying to get a bird for meat to not buy a meat bird because they're bred especially to
put on weight really fast they're like slaughtered at five weeks and they they're not built to live
a long time so if you get one and you raise it to a year old its body will start breaking down
just from the weight of itself just all the the meat on the bird they're not designed to live
to to maturity now the quintessential american birds are a combination of these two in other words
birds that have been bred to be all around useful for both eggs and meat and these are called
dual-purpose birds and if you were to ever look at an old print and an old magazine or a poster
and it showed pictures of chickens you're looking at a dual-purpose breed these are the famous ones
famous american birds like Rhode Island red the the rock varieties like Plymouth Rock the
barred rock is really really common is the kind of black and white chicken that you you would
immediately recognize the Rhode Island red is a big red orangey red chicken that you would
immediately recognize recognize other good dual-purpose birds would be the orpingtons the australorp
which is an australian version of an orpington at Delaware New Hampshire red there's a bunch of
them but basically they're they are good at laying eggs they do about one a day but they're also
a heavier-bodied bird or what's called LF large-fowl heavy-bodied bird they may weigh several pounds you
know five six seven eight nine pounds and that tends to make them more docile that they can't
well I won't say can't but it's very unlikely that they're going to be able to jump up and fly
over your fence big enough to our hawk probably wouldn't be able to take one away so the downside is
if you get a really heavy bird like a jersey giant or one of the giant orpingtons you need to be
careful about like where the roost is so that they don't jump down and hurt their feet our legs
just because they're kind of heavy the last group grouping here of birds is I want to call the
ornamental birds and these are birds that are selected mainly to be yard art because they're
interesting to look at or they have some kind of interesting feature some of them are genetic
mutations like the silkies and frizzies that have either very fine or curly feathers or the
silkies actually have kind of hair it looks like they're furry um bantoms are very small versions
of chickens um the bramas or bramas have feathers on their feet um the Polish birds have feathers
on top of their head um they're mainly to look at um in general uh birds the fancier the bird
the less egg production you'll get because they were bred for this specific aesthetic look and not
for egg production so I have four birds and my micro flock two of them are dual-purpose
Rhode Island reds and they lay brown eggs about one a day um and the size on those are usually
between USDA large and USDA extra large um I would say normally large the other two birds are
Easter eggers and in theory these were Americana's that did not meet breed standard in other words
there was something some reason why they were disqualified and so the hatcheries usually
sell them as Easter eggers so called because they lay colored eggs one of them lays uh kind of a
Robin's egg blue egg and the other one lays kind of a olive green slash like blue egg and most of
those out of the Easter eggers are medium sized USDA medium eggs and I probably get four or five
a week out of each one of those birds I'm going to put a link up to a chicken selector tool which
you can use to help uh pick a chicken breed it's kind of like picking a Linux distro based on
you know what you need uh but I'll put a link to that and you can have some fun with that and see
the different kinds of breeds that are out there and before I sign off today I'd like to
invoke the words of Douglas Adams and say don't panic there's a couple of chicken behaviors
that are strange and tend to freak out first-timers and I want to give you a heads up before you see
these behaviors the first one is uh the chickens um we talked earlier about them having gizzards and
stones in their gizzards before the food gets to their gizzard in other words they eat it through
their beak goes down their throat and it gets stored in a pouch called a crop and it's on the
right hand side of their neck um basically where the neck joins kind of where it joins the body
and the crop uh basically holds all the foods that they've eaten let's it soften with saliva
and juices and somatic juices before it goes to the gizzard and um this is where they store their food
before they digest it and so it can be a lump um you know if they're really crammed full it might
look like there's a small little maybe like a size of a billiard ball you know on the side of their
neck because they've not the side but kind of the front side um because all their food is jammed
in there um and in fact that's one way to tell whether or not your chicken is eating well as
you pick it up and you can touch it on the side of the neck and you can feel the size and the
hardness of the crop so if you see your chicken and it has what it looks like a big tumor on one
side of his neck it just ate a big meal and it's just full of food kind of like a chicken that's
eaten in eggs uh excuse me kind of like a snake that's just eaten in egg and you can see the
big lump in the snake same kind of thing happens with the chicken the next thing I wanted to warn you
is that chickens like to uh sun themselves and take dust baths and so the first time you see this
you're going to think that either your chicken is dead uh because it's laying on its side with
its wings out and its feet sprawled out like it's crazy or you may think that it's having a seizure
because it's spaszing out and flapping its wings a little and its feet are kicking and its eyes
closed and it's head on the ground and it's just playing in the dirt and you know
dusting itself for evolutionary purposes it's just it's just what they do so the first time
you see it and you think it's dead or having a seizure don't worry they're just sunbathing or
dusting themselves and the last thing I'll point out is that the term pecking order comes from
chickens and chickens tend to enforce a social order amongst themselves happy healthy chickens
have a hierarchy and although they're not cruel to each other if one gets in front of the other
at the feeder it can peck at the other's feathers or something now if they're pulling out
lots of feathers or they're causing each other to bleed then you probably have some other problems
that you might want to deal with but a normal amount of kind of lightweight bullying is just
the way chickens do things it's like the pack order and a bunch of dogs or anything else everyone
knows their place well if you've listened this far either you have fallen asleep with your headphones
on or maybe you are interested in having your own little micro flock and being a backyard suburban
chicken rancher so I'll put a couple of other links in the show notes that you can see some
websites like backyardchicken.com I think that the idea of having backyard birds is a good one
and I think that we would be better off as a country and as a planet if everybody had a few birds
in their backyard running around so I appreciate you listening see crest out no I mean brother mouse
out bye bye
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