We starting keeping chickens two years ago. I'd always liked chickens, but hadn't entertained the idea of keeping chickens until I met someone who was keeping chickens in his backyard in a nearby town. He invited me to meet his back yard flock and the rest is, as cliched people say, history. We started with three pullets, two buff Brahmas and an Ameraucana, from my new chicken-keeping friend who we affectionately call "The Chicken Man." We soon found out one of our starter flock was a rooster. Since we live inside city limits, we aren't supposed to keep roosters, so he went to live with an old high school acquaintance who keeps chickens way out in the country. After deciding to replace him, we brought home two more hens, a Barred Rock and Iowa Blue.


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Here's Pouncey and Erickson, our Ameraucana and Brahma.​



This is our Barred Rock, Bossy.


And, our wild little Iowa Blue, Ocho.

We love our girls. They're pretty spoiled. They have a daily supply of treats from our leftovers and they love to forage in the backyard. Among there favorites are bigs (of course), scratch, anything resembling bread, and all kinds of meat.

Every spring one of our girls, Erickson the Brahma, gets Broody, so we track down some fertile eggs. The first year we got them from The Chicken Man and this year we bought some from a fellow member of BYC. Our first hatching went well. We had a tiny flock of Japanese/Old English chicks that all turned out to be roosters. Talk about high strung! They had to find good homes elsewhere. This year we hatched out a hen/rooster pair of Splash Marans. After finding a home for the Roo, we kept the beautiful little hen we named Belle.



Here's our pretty Marans, Belle.​

I don't know what breed we'll get next, but we're having a great time raising backyard chickens and we talk it up any time we can. We're Chicken Ambassadors through and through. I live in the city, but I've got a cute little farm in my backyard.