Tag Archive: backyard chickens


Chicken Show! October 13th – 14th! A Chance to See Fairy Chickens in Salem, Oregon!

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September 26, 2012
Pacific Northwest Poultry Association Winter Show 2012

The PNPA Winter Show is VERY worth the visit. Only an hour from Portland, Oregon, at the Oregon State Fairgrounds. It’s a great show!

The Pacific Northwest Poultry Association (PNPA) is holding their annual Winter Show this year in Salem, Oregon at the Oregon State Fairgrounds and that means…

Fairy Chickens!

also known as Modern Game Bantams….

Gorgeously, seriously, far-out weird chickens that I have fallen in love with.

We joined the PNPA when we first came to Portland in this way:  Andrew visited Pistils Nursery to see if they wanted to stock my book, Just a Couple of Chickens, in 2010. There he met Michelle Koppe, who is a chicken-networker-raiser-expert-healer of extraordinary skill. Michelle invited me to give a presentation at the PNPA monthly meeting, which I did – about the small business, called www.TheFeatheredEgg.com, that I started in Santa Fe, New Mexico to sell blown eggs and natural feathers from my chickens, which I had ordered in the mail… a bookworthy adventure. That’s what my book was about, and the PNPA gifted us with a membership and we were hooked. We attended their spring show, out in Stevenson, WA, and now their show is down in Salem, in the much larger venue offered by the state fairgrounds.

By attending these shows, masterfully presented by the PNPA, I learned what a good chicken show can offer.
First, surprisingly, is chickens.
Just kidding.
It’s not a surprise, but the range of breeds and their colors and shapes and sizes and glamor is surprising. It’s a great place to learn more about the breeds. Second, it’s a great place to meet people who are doing interesting things in the chicken world, and network, learn, source, discover.

There are ususally birds for sale at these shows, and if not the breed you want, there are people’s phone numbers to collect. There are vendors, selling chicken-related gifts, crafts, equipment. There’s a lovely social scene with family-friendly food, and a raffle that is hard to resist. The breeders auction is a place to buy chicks and older poultry that are not usually available for sale.

This winter show, on October 13 – 14th, 2012, is special because it hosts multiple breed associations as well. A chance to see so much variety under one roof (literally) that it’s a must-see.  For backyard chicken farmers, poultry shows are the very best place to go see what backyard poultry can be. A great place to get a chicken, a great place to learn about chickens without getting a chicken. Or duck. Or Turkey. Or Goose. I love poultry shows, but I especially love THIS poultry show.

(Headsup, if there’s a live rabbit in the raffle… the cage is usually not included…)

 

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One Of The Fabulous Benefits Of The Urban Chicken Movement

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September 12, 2012
Modern Game Bantam Chicken by Tom Anderson

Fairy Chickens! The Modern Game Bantam Club of America has fabulous pictures of these fabulous chickens.

My first chickens were standard, durable, off-the-shelf, “normal” (meaning non-heritage, though shouldn’t normal really mean heritage?)… chickens. They were Buff Orpingtons, which are a hardy, robust, egg-laying meat chicken with beautiful strawberry-blond feathers.

At the time, I didn’t know anything about chickens, and these were a great breed to start with since I was learning-by-doing-it-the-hard-way, which was one of the possible taglines for the book I wrote about my chicken adventures, “Just A Couple Of Chickens”.

My second chickens were a mix of “hatchery choice” and therefore had some rare-ish breeds, most of which were still pretty hardy, like the Blue Andalusian.

But then I reluctantly left my rural adventure and moved to the city. I joined the Urban Chicken Movement (although without any chickens at first). I started to attend regional chicken shows here in the Pacific Northwest and I finally realized that I hadn’t even scratched the comb on the top of the weirdest and most wonderful chicken breeds that exist.

Since city chickens are kept in smaller flocks than most rural chickens, and city chicken keepers tend to have more money to spend on their chickens than rural farmers, the results are “specialty” chickens scratching around elegant coops in urban professional’s back yards. And that means chicken awesomeness for anyone who digs weird chickens, like me.

I’m starting my list for my next chicken adventure. A small flock of three hens in my backyard. Landlord permission, check. Coop prepared, no go. Budget set and saved up for, not at all… so it’s going to be a while. But it will provide the happy ending I am planning for my soon-to-be-available sequel to my first chicken book,  soon-to-be-titled “Just A Couple More”, and if you are interested in being on the release announcement list, please drop me a note on my contact form.

Top of my list are what my friend, Michelle Koppe, calls “Fairy Chickens“, otherwise known as Modern Game Bantams. Also top of my list are Seramas, which are mini-chickens, proud and stunning and fabulous. And expensive.

This is a faboulous benefit of city chickens… the variety and elegance and exciting connections possible. I miss my chicken adventure very much, but I shall console myself with fairy chickens one day very soon.

 

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Our Ducks Were Not Chinese Ducks

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June 27, 2012
Duck Herding Described in Just a Couple of Chickens

This picture ran on NBC news, and YouTube… but this is not how MY ducks behaved…

This week, the NBC Nightly News ran a video clip of 5,000 ducks being herded down a road in China with only two duck herders in charge.

The ducks carpeted the road, stopping traffic, in an orderly brown flood that was amazing to see. The duck herders looked perfectly relaxed, holding long bamboo poles – casually.

The story reminded me of our own experience herding ducks, which I describe in page 67 of “Just a Couple of Chickens”… my book about our adventures raising poultry in New Mexico.

“(Andrew)…had been studying a picture in our old collection of National Geographic magazines. It showed a child in rural China, about Blue’s age, herding a huge flock of white ducks with nothing more than a long stick…”

It was just the same kind of picture that encouraged me to think that I could herd ducks like a Chinese duck herder. And it did not end well. At all.

“… they stampeded hysterically in every direction. They ran peeping, stumbling, crowding each other, and veering away from us in a panic. Ducks spilled from the doorway and continued, like water, to take the path of least resistance downhill. They poured out of the pen and some went under a tree. The rest headed east very fast, breaking up into smaller duck clots at every bush… “

After that, (and many hours of duck collecting) I came to the conclusion that our ducks were not Chinese ducks. And that Chinese ducks are very different than American ducks. I preferred to think that way rather than conclude that I was not very good at raising ducks.

But as I was marveling over the brown duck flood in China… I found another piece of footage from China.  This one was taken by some American tourists driving in the Chinese countryside. They passed a duck herding event that was closer to what I had experienced… and I watched it over and over again.

Soooo… not every piece of news footage coming out of China is showing the real duck deal!  Maybe my American ducks were not so very different from Chinese ducks after all!

The duck herding chapter in “Just a Couple of Chickens” can save you a lot of time if you ever need to move your ducks.
Because there comes a day when everyone needs to move their ducks. Or at least get them in a row.

 

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