Columbia residents show off their urban chickens

Even on a Saturday when the Gamecocks weren’t playing, chickens still ruled the roost in Columbia.

Sustainable Midlands hosted a “Tour de Coop” drop-in tour of eight homes and a school in and around Columbia on Saturday to celebrate urban chicken coops and demonstrate that eggs don’t just come from the grocery store and chickens aren’t just for frying.

The city allows up to four hens in a yard – but no roosters.

Columbia’s coop keepers share a fondness for their feathered friends, noting their usefulness for fertilizing their yards and producing what they all agree are the richest, tastiest eggs around.

Birds that brighten your day

When David and Caroline Harper moved into their Shandon home about a year ago, they were excited to have a fenced-in backyard, perfect for chicken-raising.

They bought six chicks, hoping most of them would turn out to be hens. But the couple soon discovered that four of their chicks would have to go, as one by one, the birds found their crowing voices and proudly announced themselves to be roosters.

Now their two hens, Bri and Doodle, quietly roam the backyard in peaceful coexistence with Jack the cat.

“We’ll hear (the hens) just talking to one another, low little clucks,” David Harper said. “It’s easy to say that they’re pets ... . If you’re having a down day, the birds brighten your day.”

He had considered designing a custom coop for the chickens but instead decided to retrofit a portion of a shed to make a home for them. Recycled wood pieces make a ramp for Bri and Doodle to walk up to their nests, made of old fruit crates. In the corner, a small cutout door makes for easy entry and exit for the chickens, although Jack likes the door more than the hens do, Harper said.

The family appreciates the benefits of raising chickens, from the fertilizer to the compost to the eggs, he said.

“It’s a real privilege that the city’s allowing this,” he said. “It’s nice that we have the flexibility to reconnect with the source of our food.”

Meal worms, anyone?

Students at the Montessori School of Columbia are getting a firsthand, farm-to-table education when they collect the eggs from their four hens each day.

Cyndy Storm, a school volunteer who lives nearby in the Rosewood neighborhood, cares for the chicken quartet.

The hens produce a handful of eggs among them daily. And they’re “so rich,” their yolks are almost orange, Storm said. Spoiled by the taste and freshness of free-range eggs, Storm refuses to buy grocery store eggs anymore, she said.

Each night, she treats the chickens to their favorite snack, dried meal worms, to lure them into their coop. When the treats come out, the hens come running – which is better than having to chase them into the coop, Storm said.

“Chasing a chicken makes you look like a clown,” she said, smiling.

A castle among coops

“Red! Gray! Where y’all? C’mon girls!”

Robin O’Neill wanders through her friend Anne Foster’s backyard garden in the Heathwood neighborhood, her Jack Russell terrier, Phoebe, trotting alongside as she calls for Foster’s pair of aptly named hens.

She finds Gray scratching among the pine needles in a flower bed, and Red comes running along.

“They love to be where the people are,” O’Neill said.

Foster’s hens are ladies of luxury, free to roam the expansive yard and flower beds, enjoying a diet of quinoa and grapes and other tasty treats and nightly settling into their nests in their exquisite coop.

Garden beds planted with succulents, snapdragons and other budding plants form the “living” gable roof of Foster’s coop – “the Coop Palace,” O’Neill likes to call it.

Foster bought the hens several years ago after buying an antique nesting box on a shopping trip with O’Neill.

Red hasn’t always cared for the nesting box, though. For a time, she would lay eggs in the middle of a planter on the back patio, an amusing surprise for Foster, O’Neill said.

“They’re so entertaining,” O’Neill said. “You could just watch them all day long.”

This story was originally published October 11, 2014 at 8:37 PM with the headline "Columbia residents show off their urban chickens."