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.
The neighbors also look out for her birds.
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.
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.
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.
At times, she’s had to help sick or injured chickens recover.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.