Chicken coops plans

The thunder had nearly stopped rumbling and puddles dotted the ground, but Lisa Colton and her 5-year-old son, Eli, nonetheless grabbed their shoes and a container of strawberries as they wandered outside.

Colton slowly walked down steep, pergola-covered steps, grabbing some garden spring greens on the way, before stopping into a backyard patch where eight new residents had recently moved in.

“Chickens need to be fed,” Colton said.

The Coltons, along with three other families, have built and are sharing a chicken coop so they can collectively care for the animals and eventually reap the daily reward of fresh, home-grown eggs. But neither the Coltons nor their neighbors live on a farm. They are residents of Charlottesville’s dense North Downtown neighborhood, and the two-level coop is located on a flat yard space surrounded by flowers and gardens on the Coltons’ property.

“We’re all interested in interesting experiences for our kids and local food,” Colton said.

With no city ordinance barring their presence, keeping chickens seems to be growing in popularity in Charlottesville and all over the country, as more people desire to have local food.

In the past few months, an informal city network has even formed — dubbed the Charlottesville League of Urban Chicken Keepers, or CLUCK — so that residents can connect with others who are doing the same thing and are equally enthusiastic about backyard poultry. The network has a blog, 95 people in its Facebook group and 52 members in its Google group.

One national Web site, http://www.backyardchickens.com, boasted having 20,000 chicken-owning members in January, roughly 10 years after the site was created.

“People are really starting to come back to the idea that you can support yourself,” said Guinevere Higgins, who started CLUCK. Higgins said the ad hoc group started after she and her boyfriend were building their own coop last fall, and she thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we were comparing notes?”

Starting from scratch

The plan for the Coltons’ coop only started on the back of a napkin, and it received some attention from their neighbors and the city government in February, when the proposal was taken to the city’s Board of Architectural Review to get its design approved. The chickens arrived late last month.

“This is definitely a first for me,” Joe Hoskins, a woodworker, said one day in late April as he worked to build the coop. The structure, complete with roosting, feeding and nesting areas, took about a month of on-and-off work to finish, and Hoskins led the coop’s construction.

“I probably shouldn’t be building chicken coops,” Hoskins joked as he built one last month, two weeks before he had a big display show.

The parents involved in the North Downtown project all said that no individual family could have kept and taken care of the chickens alone, which is why they decided to do it together.

The four families have set up a schedule to rotate who feeds and cleans up after the birds, though on many an afternoon the Coltons’ yard is filled with children and their parents scurrying after their chickens, trying to sweep them up and pet them.

“Dare I leave them running around?” Colton said.

Urban chicken awareness

Higgins said that as it becomes trendier to keep chickens, she worries that there are people who get into the idea without knowing what to expect. With that in mind, she hopes that CLUCK can become a teaching tool to help urbanites with their poultry preparations.

Colton said she thought their chickens were reasonably adjusting to their new urban environment, especially after spending nights staring at nearby streetlamps.

Belmont resident Luke Cole, who built a mobile coop and was hoping he would get his three chickens this weekend, said chickens are pretty easy to take care of — and aren’t noisy or smell unless gathered in the hundreds.

“They’re way low maintenance,” said Cole, whose Belmont coop is his second. “They’re sweet and odorless, and not loud.”

Kathryn Russell, who owns Majesty Farm in North Garden in Albemarle County, said urban chicken keeping was also a popular idea in the early 20th century, before the rise of the suburb in American society. The advantages of keeping chickens in cities, she said, are numerous.

“The more people can see where their food comes from, the better off we all are,” she said.

Never too many eggs

Colton said the families would also teach their children — nine between all of them — about the origins of their food. But that does not mean the eight adults aren’t excited as well as they wait for as many hens, which are colored with gold, red and black feathers, to start laying eggs next month.

The families have even named some of their feathered fowl — Minerva Louise, Henny Penny and Georgina.

Gillian Grimm, whose family is sharing the coop, said she could not wait until she would be able to bake with the eggs. Once they start, the hens will each lay one egg a day for most of the year.

“There will never be too many eggs,” Grimm said.

Colton said the first thing she would probably make are eggs over easy because of her love of yolks, and Hoskins said he would first make a soft-boiled egg where the yolk was still runny and eat it with a small spoon, just like his grandfather used to do.

“Everybody’s pretty excited about it,” Colton said.

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