Animal kills cats, chickens in Fresno County

A Fresno County neighborhood is worried about the death of several pets in their community.

An animal has been killing chickens and at least one cat in a rural neighborhood on McKinley west of Highway 99.

Lots of folks in Fresno County have backyard chicken coops, or even pet chickens. And they can become tasty targets for a variety of wild animals.

This backyard has been home to a small flock of chickens for more than 20 years. But their numbers are declining, quickly.

In the past week one chicken a night has been killed by an unknown predator. Their owner, Stella Mange says she is awakened by their screams, which sound almost human.

Action News asked, "You didn't know chickens could scream."

"Not like that," replied Mange. "Not like that I mean they were screaming for their life. It's really heartbreaking because they are like pets to you."

Stella's chickens have free run of the yard. They roost at night in a tree. But whatever is killing them climbs right up. Stella's daughter Debbie says there's usually not much left.

Stella's Daughter, Debbie Hatfield said, "There was feathers, different piles of feathers all through here down the side of the house and the last one that had actual chicken remains, we had to clean up that mess."

Now, it's not just chickens. A neighborhood cat was found ripped apart next door.

In talking to experts we've learned the most likely culprit is a red fox. They are common along the outskirts of the city. With an empty field next to her property, a fox would have easy access to Stella's chickens, and they can climb trees and they like coyotes can kill cats.

Stella is doing what she can she's bought a trap, but so far, the predator hasn't bothered it. She keeps a BB gun ready, in case she sees the culprit. But admits it won't do much. She wants to protect the animals, but feels helpless.

Mange saidm "I feel sorry for them because I'm defenseless I can't do nothing for them."

The Fresno County Agriculture Commissioner's office is responsible for keeping wild animals from commercial poultry and livestock operations. Action News contacted them on Stella's behalf, and they have offered to help.

Red foxes are not native species and can be treated as pests and killed if necessary.

Talking chickens: Plastic v wooden houses

In recent years a new player has emerged onto the backyard poultry housing market: the plastic chicken house.

One of the biggest claims you will see in the advertising literature for these new plastic constructions relates to the poultry keeper's nemesis, red mite (Dermanyssus gallinae).

For those that are not familiar with this little devil, it's a small ectoparasite that feeds on the blood of poultry and other bird species. In the right conditions it can complete its life cycle of egg to egg-laying adult in seven days, so populations can explode if they're not dealt with quickly and effectively. And they can survive without feeding for up to nine months. All this makes red mite the bane of the poultry keeper's life and something that is capable of killing your flock. For those familiar with it, you will no doubt be itching by now, in the knowledge that they are not opposed to trying out a human as a potential host.

I've seen one or two adverts that stake the claim that plastic housing is red mite-proof. Don't be fooled by this. The consensus is that red mite lives in cracks in the housing and come out to feed on the birds blood at night when they are roosting; but this isn't not the whole truth – red mite can and will live on the bird if the conditions are favourable.

Let's face it, the other widely-held belief is that wild birds transport red mite. Well if red mite are only present on birds when they are asleep, how can they be transported to poultry and poultry housing by wild birds - sleepwalking sparrows perhaps? Agreed, a house that minimises the cracks and crevices stands a fair better chance of not harbouring a red mite population, but that doesn't mean you or your poultry will necessarily be red mite-free: very little other than vigilance and good animal husbandry will stop the charge of the mite brigade.

Where plastic house construction does come into its own versus wood is when it comes to cleaning and annual maintenance. The cleaning of plastic houses is much easier than wooden housing, and maintenance is practically zero. Many of the plastic designs can be cleaned out, washed and dried in under 30 minutes, while wooden housing will take significantly longer to dry, especially in the depths of winter. This advantage should not be underestimated. In the height of summer your flock may not require the house for the whole day and so cleaning and drying times won't be relevant, but on bad weather days you won't want the house out of action for too long or for the birds to face roosting in a soggy house.

So what's to be said for wooden housing? The cost of a high quality wooden ones will be in the same region as the plastic designs (avoid the poorly constructed cheap and nasty wood built houses mentioned in my last post), so there's little in it from a price perspective. It boils down to design. Plastic housing represents a fraction of the market when it comes to available options. Wooden houses offer a far greater level of flexibility and modification with housing available not only to meet the specific needs of your specific breeds, but also the needs of your garden. They are also far easier to repair should the need arise.

Wood is a naturally breathable product and a well-designed wooden house will not suffer from condensation, which can be a problem in poultry housing. Inadequate ventilation coupled with a non-breathable material such as plastic will result in moisture running down the walls, resulting in a damp floor litter that leades to fungal growth and respiratory disorders in the birds.

The plastic v wooden debate has been going on in the poultry world for a few years now. I use both and they each have their pros and cons: in the end it can be down to personal preference. As long as the house is designed with both the keeper and the poultry in mind, and preferably designed by somebody whose experience of poultry extends beyond a visit to the butcher, then they both wooden and plastic housing serve their purpose in equal measure.

Spartanburg City Council passes first reading on chicken ordinance

There just might be a chicken dance soon inside Dr. Brian Rothemich's Coop D'Ville.

Spartanburg City Council voted in favor of amending its 2009 animal control ordinance Monday to allow residents to own up to six hens, with some restrictions.

Rothemich, a retired Spartanburg physician, had asked council to amend its ordinance to allow hens after he was cited this past autumn for having five hens in his Coop D'ville — a chicken coop outside his Converse Heights home.

Rothemich's request has since prompted lengthy debate on council and culminated Monday during a public hearing designed to gauge citizen's interest in allowing a limited number of hens.

Several city residents spoke, and a couple of comments were received from people who live in the county, during a public hearing Monday in support of Rothemich's request. Most said owning hens was not much different than owning cats or dogs if the owner is responsible in providing a safe, protected and clean area for their animals.

Only one resident, Jack Slemenda of Hillbrook Drive, spoke against the proposal, citing possible disease concerns and that hens could be prey for predators such as coyotes and foxes. Slemenda said a “handful of cities might allow hens, but that was hardly a reason for Spartanburg” to do so.

“We've been made to believe by a handful of people that if we allow this, Spartanburg has arrived, but there are more important issues that need to be addressed other than whether to allow henhouses,” he said.

Others, including a pediatrician and a veterinarian in addition to Rothemich, asked council to consider the proposal. Some, however, said the guidelines that staff had introduced were too restrictive.

Rothemich reiterated the health benefits of fresh eggs and said hens don't produce nearly the noise that an annoying barking dog does.

Rothemich said asking adjacent neighbors to endorse hens annually was cumbersome, but he didn't balk at paying an annual fees as suggested by Councilwoman Linda Dogan.

Dogan previously had spoken against the proposal, but she made the motion to approve the item on first reading if owners paid an annual fee — she suggested $5 per hen — during the permitting process.

City Manager Ed Memmott said it would be appropriate for council to discuss possible fees during its budget sessions in May, and the public would have an opportunity to speak for or against fees at that time. Any fee would likely go into effect on July 1, 2012, the first day of the next fiscal year.

Councilman Joe Spigner voted against the measure, saying he was voting the conscience of his constituents.

Spigner, who is running for re-election this year, said he's been talking with residents in his district and has not met one constituent who is in favor of allowing hens in the city.

“When I talk to people, I hear a lot of skepticism,” he said. “I'm just trying to echo their sentiments.”

Councilwoman Cate Ryba, whose district includes Converse Heights, said she's excited the item has been approved, and she thinks having a fee associated with the permitting process is fair.

“What we heard tonight is that hens are pets with the added bonus of laying eggs,” Ryba said. “I think it's clear from the majority of those who spoke here tonight is this is something people want.”

Chooks poached from St James Primary School

BRAZEN thieves targeted a Ballarat school, hair salon, trout farm, bakery and a garden store at the weekend, in five separate incidents that cost business owners thousands of dollars in lost goods and equipment.

Six chickens were taken from St James’ Parish Primary School in Sebastopol on Saturday, upsetting pupils on their first day back after the holidays.

Deputy principal Peter Fahey said it was the second time thieves had targeted the school in the past 12 months.

Late last year six other chickens were taken from the school and never recovered.

After that incident, pupils installed a lock, sensor lights and heavy wire on the chicken coop, in an effort to deter thieves.

Grade five pupil Ella Kendall said her classmates were finding it hard to deal with losing the chickens for a second time.

“It’s pretty upsetting because we’ve taken all of these precautions and the chickens were almost ready to lay eggs,” she said.

Ballarat Garden Supplies owner Brendan Lovell said thieves made off with more than $5000 in tools and equipment from his business.

He said they also “went through” two offices at the Mount Clear site.

“It’s pretty hard to recover from something like this – it is a massive set-back,” he said.

Staff arrived at the Alfredton Bakery yesterday to find the building ransacked.

Thieves broke through two locked doors to steal a set of knives, an audio system and to ransack the building, casing a major headache for the owners.

A Mount Clear hairdressing salon was also hit, with thieves breaking in about 3.30am yesterday.

Upper Cutz Hair Studio owner Emily Tripp said the back door was forced open before thieves helped themselves to more than $1000 in cash and equipment.

“They’re pigdogs – I’d like to get my hands on them,” she said.

Ballarat Trout Hatchery president Dennis Ventley said his organisation’s Lake Wendouree office was trashed during the weekend break-in.

“Any break-in is always a set-back,” he said.

“We’ve been rolled quite a number of times actually – at least they didn’t take too much this time. We’re a volunteer organisation, all run by volunteers so something like this really hurts,” he said.

Ballarat Police Sergeant Jo Graham said police did not have reason to believe the thefts were linked.

Backyard coops produce great pets

Neal Brown has a chicken farm so tiny, the North Carolina Poultry Federation doesn’t even know it exists. The City of Greenville does, however, and that’s why Farmer Brown is not looking to expand.

Brown and his wife, Paula, have joined a growing number of urban dwellers cooping laying hens behind their homes. Raleigh has so many city chickens, coop owners organized the annual Tour d’Coop, which sells tickets for a first-hand look at keeping chickens in an urban environment.

Proceeds from the Tour d’Coop benefit a local food bank.

Greenville allows up to four hens per dwelling, but no roosters, for obvious reasons.

While the urban-coop movement is largely egged on by animal or environmental activism, that is not what inspired the Browns to raise chickens at their home in Westhaven subdivision.

“Our granddaughters said they wanted either a pony or chickens,” Brown said. “We went with chickens.”

The retired railroad conductor went to work last fall on building a playhouse for granddaughters Sarah Ruth, 3, and Caroline, 5. The structure’s bottom half became an indoor/outdoor chicken coop this spring.

Playing off the unique building’s dual purpose, an attached sign reads, “Chicks Over Chicks.”

Brown had never raised chickens, so he relied on the Internet for guidance.

“I went on Craigslist and found a guy in Hookerton with about 10 varieties of chicks,” he said. “I asked if he could determine their sex, and he said no.”

From an initial batch of 10 chicks, Brown ended up with four birds he could keep. He gave the roosters away.

Now, the hens have the run of the Browns’ backyard and allow the girls to pick them up and carry them. Holding a big brown hen, Caroline recited their names: “Holly, Heather, Calico and Crooked Neck.”

Crooked Neck was injured as a chick and cannot hold its head up straight.

“I found out that when that happens to them, they’re not supposed to survive,” Brown said. “They’ll either starve to death or the other chickens will kill them. Does that chicken look like it’s starving?”

Crooked Neck manages to strut around the yard and find plenty of chicken feed despite the condition. Besides feed, the birds will eat most any flowering plant. For meticulous landscapers such as the Browns, that can be a problem.

“They’ll eat everything but the weeds,” Brown said. “They love my hostas and every blooming plant I’ve got, but they won’t eat my weeds.”

Brown has had to wrap some of his more delicate plants in chicken wire. To reward him for his troubles, the chickens produce daily eggs.

“We started keeping egg cartons this summer,” Paula said, displaying a carton filled with brown eggs, “because we knew we were going to start getting eggs.”

“I love breakfast,” Neal Brown said. “It’s my favorite meal of the day.”

As with all poultry, just follow the recipe

Like that revelatory moment when martinis start to taste good or summer turns with one chill breeze to fall, that's how chicken farming entered my synapses — synap, crackle, pop.

Our friends Mitch and Teresa were taking the kids on vacation for a few weeks, leaving their pre-pubescent hens in the hands of several neighbors, who tag-teamed the task. One neighbor one week, another the next. I found our stint with the chickens just long enough to fall in love with the whole concept.

"I want chickens too," said the little guy. So there you go.

Reminds me of disco, the senseless way raising your own chickens has swept the country, except that I think there is something deeper to it, more symptomatic of our current neuroses over the economy. Being self-sustaining seems suddenly very appealing.

All I know for sure is that organic is good, but nonorganic is far cheaper. And a chicken is really a beautiful and impressive bird, particularly when properly seasoned and roasted.

In Mitch and Teresa's case, they were simply seeking some fresh eggs in the morning, along with a little hobby for their two boys.

When I first visited, I'd expected something like that yard in "The Wizard of Oz," with chickens running everywhere and gingham-wearing movie stars falling into hog pens, but Teresa and Mitch's backyard was remarkably normal. Nice pool. Cabana. Chicken hut.

There were tomatoes reddening in the garden, and loads of lettuce, which we were told we could feed to the chickens because they love greens. There was also a tub of chicken feed.

Basically, like me, a chicken will eat anything.

Mitch had built the 10-foot-by-10-foot coop. Before the California real estate crash, it alone would've fetched $450,000. Now far less. Because the schools are decent, probably in the $200,000-$300,000 range. Like I said, they have a pool.

Anyway, the first thing a backyard chicken farmer does is acquire some chicks, which apparently — like Canadian Viagra — can be bought through the mail.

"As long as the birds are properly packaged and can reach their destination within 72 hours of hatching, the U.S. Postal Service will accept live birds for delivery," a National Geographic article explains.

Foolishly obsessive over all new activities, I picked up a copy of "Recipe for Raising Chickens" by Minnie Rose Lovgreen, who is to chickens what Shakespeare was to broken hearts.

"You can test a hen to see if she's laying," Lovgreen writes. "There are two bones [on] either side of a hen's rectum. You see, a hen only has one vent for everything. If you can fit two of your folded knuckles … ."

OK, let's move on.

Lovgreen advises that it's good to clean the henhouse once a year with lime, and the thought of all these suburban moms and dads spending a Saturday brushing lime paste onto nesting boxes makes me think this chicken-raising phenomenon might last about one more week.

"Another kind of mite gets on the chickens' legs, and their legs get scaly," Lovgreen writes. "Rubbing carbolated Vaseline on their legs at night should help this problem."

There's another activity that will be hugely popular with our suburb's Chardonnay Moms.

Meanwhile, Lovgreen says roosters are necessary if you want fertile eggs, and "it's perfectly all right to eat fertile eggs, or non-fertile eggs. They taste the same. Sometimes people wonder about that."

A Tour of Chicago’s Chicken Coops

I must admit that Chicago was the last place I expected to have a close encounter with livestock that weren’t part of a petting zoo. But with the growing popularity of urban agriculture, it’s beginning to feel like “Green Acres” around here.

Remember the runaway roosters spotted on Paulina this past summer? They have friends. Lots of them.

The second annual tour of Chicago’s backyard chicken coops, held in late September and sponsored by Windy City Chickens, featured 27 locations that stretched from Evanston to Hyde Park. And those were just the people willing to open up their homes to strangers.

On a relentlessly drizzly afternoon, I set out to visit the handful of coops within walking distance of Lincoln Square, pulling on a pair of rubber boots as a precautionary measure. (Do I have to spell it out for you? OK: p-o-o-p.) My first stop: Ainslie, where I was a bit freaked out to discover that the chickens were of the free range variety. As in, they had the run of the yard. Maybe I was Tippi Hedren in a past life, because I have an illogical fear of being pecked to death by birds.

“They’re not really aggressive,” coop keeper Tom Boeman assured me.

That was just one of the myths dispelled during the course of my adventure; education, it turned out, was the primary goal of the tour, according to Martha Boyd, program director of Angelic Organics Learning Center’s Urban Initiative in Chicago and moderator of the Chicago Chicken Enthusiasts website. (CCE is an excellent resource for anyone in a fowl frame of mind. Don’t have a yard? There are co-op options.)

The common misconception that backyard chickens are a messy, stinky, noisy nuisance nearly led to a ban on the birds four years ago by Chicago’s City Council, until Ald. Mary Ann Smith (48th Ward) stepped in and brokered a reprieve. The bad rap can be blamed more on those doing a poor job of tending to their flocks than the chickens themselves, Boyd noted. “We do what we can to help people understand it’s legal,” she said. “What we’ve been trying to do is say there are policies on the books to take care of any problems. That’s why I try to get aldermen and their staff out to see what it should be.”

If the tour is any indication, what those aldermen will likely discover: clean and well-maintained coops and healthy, beautiful birds being cared for like any household pet that happens to live outdoors. “The people who are doing this well are our ambassadors,” said Boyd.

“Doing well” typically means eliminating the major issue associated with urban chickens: Mr. Rooster, we’re talking about you and your cock-a-doodle-do. “Roosters are amazingly loud,” admitted Boyd. “In some neighborhoods, people grew up with the sound and like it, but it’s by far the biggest complaint.” While roosters are not prohibited in Chicago, excessive noise is and that includes crowing.  “I just recommend no rooster,” said Boyd.

The owners I visited, all of them relative newbies with less than five years total experience among them, had taken that advice to heart.

Boeman, who raised his chickens from eggs, wound up with five hens and a couple of roosters. “We recognized that could be an issue,” he said of the roosters, so he found them a home with a farmer he met at the Oak Park farmers market. (Yeah, and my mom just happened to run into a “farmer” when she took our cat, Cuddles, to the animal shelter. I made Boeman swear his story was legit.)

While hens are typically much quieter cluckers (and certainly no more annoying than a barking dog, said Boeman), owners have come across the occasional obnoxious exception, the same way that out of millions of Italian-Americans, you’re bound to find a Snooki. Brian Westphal and Mike McVickar welcomed four foster chickens to their home on Winona when a friend received 10 by mistake. “But I only see three,” I noted.

The fourth hen was Rhonda. “She was very sassy. Personally, for us, she was a little too noisy,” McVickar explained. So they shipped her off to Westphal’s sister and brother-in-law, who run a farm in Wisconsin (swear to God), where Rhonda reacted like Carrie Bradshaw shipped off to, well, a farm in Wisconsin. She took one look at her less manicured country bumpkin sisters and promptly tried to escape. “She was definitely a city chicken,” laughed McVickar.

Prima donnas like Rhonda aside, owners agreed that chickens are actually quite low maintenance beyond the initial learning curve and coop construction: Chickens don’t need to be walked, there’s no litter box to deal with and unlike other exotic pets, they don’t cause widespread panic when they run away from home.