A freewheelin’ fowl found on the east side of the city has a hen house to nest in, thanks to a family of backyard chicken keepers in Sapperton.
A brown hen was seen strutting on Garfield Street earlier this month. A woman who saw the feathered escapee thought it might belong to Dan Perry and Paula Cole, a local couple who keep chickens.
“People know us in the nighbourhood, that we have chickens,” Cole says.
The neighbour knocked on the door of their house at Eighth Avenue and Braid Street to say she’d seen the roaming chicken. Cole checked her coop, but her two hens were locked safely inside.
She was unable to find the woman who told her about the loose hen because by the time Cole made it outside, the woman was gone.
But Cole and a friend, who lives on Garfield Street, found the bird clucking about in someone’s front yard. They cornered the feathered runaway and brought it to Cole’s coop and started trying to find the owner. Cole didn’t want to leave the chicken on the streets, where it would be vulnerable prey for coyotes or raccoons.
“It was really tame,” Cole says. “I picked her right up. I thought it might have been a rooster at first. Then my husband got home, and he knows way more about chickens, and he said, ‘No, it’s not a rooster; it’s a hen.’”
Cole contacted Jen Arbo, another chicken keeper in the neighbourhood, but it wasn’t one of her two birds.
Arbo blasted out a Tweet to her followers, but so far no one has turned up to claim the mystery hen. For now, Perry and Cole are fostering the bird.
“We still have no idea how it could have happened. Chickens are definitely not a wild animal,” says Perry, who does the bulk of looking after their backyard hens.
He started keeping chickens as a self-sustainability project – Perry also keeps bees and has fruit trees in his yard.
The father-of-four started with six hens, but a pesky raccoon managed to gobble up four before Perry devised a way to keep it out. They were down to two before the arrival of the runaway.
Arbo is another chicken keeper in the neighbourhood - she also has two hens, named Noodle and Giblet, which are of the Silver Laced Wyandotte breed - handsome, plump black-and-white chickens that produce tan eggs.
Eggs - that is the reason Arbo and Perry keep chickens, though both admit the cost of keeping the coop, feeding and caring for the birds doesn't make their raised eggs much cheaper than buying an organic dozen every now and then.
But there's nothing like the feeling of grabbing a fresh laid egg from the coop to cook up. It's especially nice for their kids to see that animals - real, breathing beings - produce the food they eat.
Gone afowl: Haydn, left, Reason, Dan Perry and Keen with the hen they're fostering. Perry's wife, Paula Cole, heard about the bird from a neighbour who knocked on her door to see if the hen was one of theirs. It wasn't, but the family is keeping it until the mystery owner is found. Photograph By Jason Lang/THE RECORD
Arbo and her husband, Ross, knew they wanted to have a coop when they moved into their house.
"Chickens are something that I think are a really easy way to have the opportunity to have incredible, high-quality eggs, number 1, and they ensure that the eggs you consume are from chickens who are well kept," says Arbo, who jokingly calls her coop Poulet Chalet.
Arbo laughs when she says where she got the two birds, "Craigslist. Where else do you get chickens?"
They bought them through Charity Chicks, a now-defunct charity for women who were leaving transition housing.
"I spent $30 a chicken. That's probably a higher price than what most people pay, but because it was a charitable organization I was happy to give them the extra bucks. I'm your typical hipster urban chicken keeper in that I'm like only $30, that's fine," she laughs. "The people that sell chickens on Craigslist, that are actual farmers, probably just roll their eyes at people like me."
But no one can say the Sapperton chicken families haven't stayed committed to their plucky friends.
Now hopefully, the rebel runaway doesn't fly the coop, again.
