Donna Pizzuto walked a few blocks to fellow chicken owner Karen Fawcett’s home one bright Monday morning with a smirk on her face. She had a hen in her arms and commented that she was just giving morning commuters something to talk about at the office that day.
From the other direction, Blayne Borden walked up with “JLo” tucked in her arms. Once placed on the ground, the frilly bantam hen was chased by the other hens in Fawcett’s yard and scurried back to Borden.
“They know she’s new,” Borden said, adding that chickens usually need time to adjust to new members of the flock.
Pizzuto, Fawcett and Borden all are residents of Southland’s bustling Rosemill neighborhood—minutes from downtown Lexington and a mile from the University of Kentucky. Fawcett hops on the bus to get to work at UK every day; Borden is a home-school mom who is preparing to rejoin the full-time workforce at Lexington Public Library; and Pizzuto is a former engineering designer turned massage therapist.
No longer just a staple on farms, chickens can be found in backyards throughout the Rosemill area and are a common—and sometimes surprising—sight around many urban Kentucky neighborhoods. The three have gotten to know one another because of their chickens, and Pizzuto noted that her feathered friends definitely are a community builder.
“They’ve been well-received,” she said of her four hens. “I guess my girls have been pretty entertaining. When I first got them, they wanted to roost in the tree. And I’d come out, and someone would be stopped in the street looking at my chickens.”
The neighbors also look out for her birds.
“I was walking [my dog] one morning and some guy drove by and saw me and said, ‘I had to put one of your chickens back in your yard,’ ” Pizzuto recalled. “They’ve never wandered far, even when they get out.”
She employs neighborhood kids to help look after the chickens if she has to be gone for longer periods of time, and kids will shoo the hens back into the yard if they perch up on the fence.
Connecting her own child with the food cycle was a big motivator for Borden to raise chickens.
“My son was probably 6 or 7 when we first got chickens, so it was fun for him to learn about the eggs and get a general education of basic animal reproduction,” she said. “We first got chickens about seven years ago because a neighbor two houses down had a bunch of silkies [a breed with fluffy plumage], and he was moving, and my son really liked the chickens.”
So they began with two hens and two roosters and have had several other chickens over the years, their flock size varying with predator attacks and some new chicks.
Borden said her family had no experience raising chickens, but having previously lived in Olympia, Washington, where keeping backyard chickens was fairly common, they were accustomed to them. Starting their flock in Lexington, she said, was simple because they had chickens and a coop given to them.
But they learned after predator attacks that a sturdier coop would be necessary to keep their hens alive.
“We had this short little fence, and everything was fine. But then we realized we needed more,” Borden said. “It’s amazing how you think your coop is secure, and then you come out in the morning, and you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, what happened?’ You go out in the morning and see dead chickens.
“I felt so guilty thinking that I’d been entrusted with these animals, and they all died on my watch! Everybody loves chicken, even the predators.”
Predators—primarily raccoons, possums and hawks—can be problematic in urban neighborhoods. Borden also learned the hard way that some chickens could, in fact, fly before their wings were clipped, as she spent days trying to get a new flock of Old English Game Bantam hens out of the trees around her house.
She now has a big, sturdy coop with padlocks to keep her birds safe. She said her cats have never been an issue.
Some of the other challenges and expenses of keeping chickens include appropriate feed, treating chicken ailments, and coop maintenance.
“Depending on the chickens, you can spend a lot of money on chickens and coops,” Borden said. “But if you’re handy, you can make the coops, and you can find some commercially made ones for cheap.”
At times, she’s had to help sick or injured chickens recover.
“It’s been an enjoyable experiment, and I’ve also learned a lot about gross things that I can handle,” Borden said. “It’s kind of like parenting.”
But the chicken-owning benefits, especially having fresh eggs, outweigh the hurdles.
“They’re interesting creatures to watch,” Borden said. “I really like it because they eat all of our food scraps and all of the yard waste. We have a system of fences that we’ve used, where we keep them in the front garden until the raspberries bloom so they kind of keep the weeds down there. Then we move them back to the back, so they really work an area, particularly when you have six or eight of them. And the eggs are nice, too.
“It’s cool to go, ‘Oh, I have this leftover food, and I can give it to them, and they’ll turn it into an egg,’ ” Borden added. “And they’re just fun. We had one rooster that was sweet. He’d find a big worm or something good to eat, and he’d call the little hens over to eat. He was very chivalrous, but loud.”
Borden does not use them, but some chicken owners use lights throughout the winter to keep the chickens producing more eggs. A full-size chicken will lay about five eggs per week, slowing down as it ages. Egg size and color vary based on the breed.
Fawcett, who also has a small flock of four chickens and first brought baby chicks home four years ago when they were 5 weeks old, said most hens will begin laying around 6 or 7 months old.
“We’ve always had animals, so having more animals was normal, but we did not have any major experience with chickens,” Fawcett said. “We thought we wanted to be in a little more control of the food that we eat, and this seemed the easiest way to start. We can grow a few things in the garden, but between pests and creatures and rain or no rain—I don’t have a green thumb. But I can take care of animals.”
Depending on the city, roosters generally are not allowed, but there are rarely limits on keeping hens in Kentucky. It’s up to residents to find out the rules and ordinances for their cities and homeowners associations, and to be courteous to neighbors.
“Sharing eggs with neighbors is always a good way for them to overlook an hour of your hens squawking on a sunny afternoon,” Fawcett said. “Even hens can get noisy sometimes, and their waste can smell sometimes when it gets wet and the wind blows.”
Fawcett said that coops run the gamut of homemade to kits to expensive custom builds.
“Most people build their own that I’ve seen,” she said. “Our coop is not a showplace, but it’s very functional, and I like it because I can walk into it. When we built our first coop and put our chickens in it, we thought it was cute, but then I was just never happy with having them penned up. It does keep them safe from predators, though.
“During the day, we just open the door, and they stay in the fenced backyard. They just come in at night and get locked in to be safe from the raccoons and possums and hawks. When they were babies and an airplane flew overhead, they instinctively ran for cover.”
Fawcett said that chicken owners should research the correct types of feed. She said new chicks can cost as little as $5 each, and the best asset to raising chickens is common sense.
“It’s amazing to have such a connection with your food without having to kill it,” she said, adding that her teenage son can just walk outside in the morning, grab an egg, and fry it before school.
Aside from providing fresh eggs, the chickens are interesting critters to keep.
“They come when I call; they follow me around,” Borden said with a laugh. “I know it’s only because I feed them, but that’s the only reason that my cats do, too. They also have interesting different vocabularies that they use.
“It’s been fun. It’s really cool to go on walks, and you walk by and see a coop. It’s like seeing a Volkswagen van and doing the wave. So it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, you must be good people; you have chickens.’ The neighborhood is really supportive.”
Pizzuto’s quiet little yard on a corner lot affords great chicken visibility to people walking past. She initially dove into the hobby about five years ago because of her garden.
“I always had a vegetable garden, and my veggies weren’t looking so good … My soil was pretty bad, and I just didn’t want to use artificial things, so I decided chickens would be a nice organic way of handling it. Circle of life,” she said. “I’m using the chicken poop on my garden, eating the vegetables, and the chickens are aerating the soil. They go in there and till it every once in a while, but I have a gate up, so they don’t dig up the new plants.”
She said raising chickens can sometimes be a lot of work, especially with chicks, but that her current flock of four chickens is fairly easy to deal with.
“Sometimes when I’m working late massaging—and in the winter especially when it’s dark early—I get home and walk back there and say, ‘Are you all in there?’ And I hear, ‘cluck cluck,’ and then I shut the door. They do talk back,” she said, adding that when she’s not home, she typically leaves her chickens in their coop.
Pizzuto said there haven’t been any issues with her dogs and the chickens once they became accustomed to each other.
“But my son’s dog just runs circles around the coop and wants to play with them when he visits,” she said with a laugh. “ ‘Let me just play with you—to death.’ ”
As far as expenses go, Pizzuto acknowledges that she spends a little more than some other chicken owners might. She uses fresh pine shavings in her coop and cleans it out often. In the winter, she adds straw to keep the hens warmer and sometimes buys them snacks like cracked corn or makes “pumpkin pie” treats for her “girls.”
“They’re silly, but I enjoy them,” she said with a grin. “It’s a fun hobby.”