My neighbor recently asked if she could have a dozen eggs. She told me a special guest was visiting who only ate locally sourced food, even when traveling.
"Of course,” I replied, and dropped them off. They’re good neighbors and we have plenty of eggs.
Our eight backyard chickens, three silver-laced Wyandottes and five Rhode Island reds, are all named Goldie or Diamond depending on the breed, and they’re all good layers.
This is our second experiment in raising backyard chickens. We lost our first flock, a pandemic era experiment, in a raccoon massacre. Owning chickens is fraught with worry. There’s always some predator ready to wreak havoc.
The first thing you learn when raising chickens is that everything eats chickens.
We’ve had chickens killed by hawks, a skunk, a dog, and an owl, which apparently only eats the head. Total carnage is the signature of the raccoon. They will wantonly kill every bird they find, leaving piles of uneaten corpses. That’s what happened to our sweet chickens two years ago when I forgot to lock up their coop one night.
The trauma almost made me swear off chickens. But last spring we decided to start again with a box of tiny, peeping chicks from Tractor Supply, the prospect of poultry heartbreak lurking in the future. (I recently awoke out of a deep sleep after suddenly recalling that I forgot to close the coop before going to bed. I ran into the backyard barely dressed to find the hens cheerfully clucking on their roosts. My son had checked on them during the night.)
Incredible, edible eggs
I’m very proud of our chickens.
They produce six, seven, even eight beautiful brown eggs every day, which is amazing when you think about it. Wild birds, by comparison, lay just three or four eggs per year. I realize that wild birds put all their energy into raising offspring, which has enormous challenges, but our chickens lay every day.
Consider the metabolic fortitude required from a creature barely more than skin and feathers. The average hen each day encapsulates a nutrient rich yolk draped in a thick blob of albumen inside a durable, sterile shell built from calcium drawn from its bones. All I do is crack one open and fry it.
Each egg is a mini miracle.
While I wax poetic about my eight backyard chickens, around 300 billion commercial layers in the U.S. produce nearly 110 billion eggs per year.
This mass production is not without risks.
Rather than marauding raccoons, commercial producers are constantly fighting the myriad diseases that infect domestic birds, especially those raised in filthy, cramped conditions.
The danger of bird flu
Last month 1.6 million chickens at the nation’s largest egg producer, Cal-Maine Foods farm in Palmer County, Texas, suffered “depopulation” after testing positive for HPAI, or Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, otherwise known as H5N1 bird flu.
This highly infectious and deadly disease has decimated poultry flocks across the U.S. for several years, one of the reasons behind the jump in retail egg prices.
More than 82 million chickens since 2022 have been killed to stop its spread, including around 16 million in Ohio.
Federal health officials say this vigilance is keeping us safe from tainted eggs, but there are other factors.
Bird flu is bad, very bad.
What’s really concerning is that H5N1 bird flu over the past few months has spread to at least 46 dairy cattle herds in nine states, including a farm near Toledo.
It’s not known exactly how the virus spreads from birds to cows, but nearly each week new herds are added to the tally.
There is some evidence that the H5N1 bird flu can be transmitted through raw milk or even undercooked eggs. Fragments of the virus have been found in pasteurized milk samples using PCR testing, which shows that it's in the milk, but unable to infect people because of the sterilization process.
The H5N1 bird flu virus has also spread to around 20 other mammal species, including mink, red foxes, skunks, opossums and, most disturbingly, seals and sea lions.
Seals, for some reason, are especially sickened by the virus and are dying in large numbers around the globe. Whole populations of elephant seals in South American have been wiped out in recent months by the bird flu virus.
A dairy worker in Texas is the only human to catch H5N1 during this outbreak. His only symptom was conjunctivitis. Health officials are encouraged that the virus does not easily infect humans or spread between people. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is being very watchful. The bird flu virus is mutating in other mammals and could some day be a threat to humans.
Which brings me back to my chickens.
I do worry about them getting bird flu, but I’m keeping a close eye on them. I don’t want them, or us, to get sick. But I think we’re safe. They don’t interact with other chickens or migrating waterfowl, which are believed to spread the disease.
My chickens happily scratch around the yard and lay eggs every day, each with a thick brown shell and a dark yolk, as wholesome as a chicken can create. Despite our fretting, the eggs from the backyard are one less worry in a world of compounding perils outside our little urban homestead.
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