Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.

In this week’s issue:

🌳 Backyard chicken tending

🌤️ Upcoming outdoors events

Let’s dig in!

-Nicole

PS. ATX Outsiders is our community who meet IRL outside each month. Join us!

Upcoming events I’m co-hosting:

NATURE SPOTLIGHT

In a previous version of my life, I played a high-stakes beer pong game where the winner determined the next household pet.

I won.

Obviously.

Chicken tending first crossed my mind as a possibility during a key conversation in 2010 at Filthy McNasty’s in Belfast with a Nor’n Irish farmer, whose delight in hen personalities included an impersonation of their ground-scratching and side-eyeing.

He was not wrong.

Today we’re pecking our way through backyard chicken tending.

Chicken Logistics

  • Effort required, once the coop and run are established: so very little. Water. Layer feed. The food scraps from your meal prep/your toddler’s changed mind. Some admiration/pep talks. Egg collecting. An occasional muck.

  • The city of Austin allows up to 10 backyard fowl per household without a permit

    • HOAs can have different opinions and inordinate power on the subject

  • You can have a rooster, but you are an adult with discernment and you don’t have to, plus the city noise ordinance makes a case to toe on this side of sanity

  • To acquire hens: while I now opt to buy laying hens over chicks to skip the questionable sex and fragile heat-lamp-induced survival phase, chicks are cute. Callahan’s, Tractor Supply, or a local elementary’s school egg-hatching unit are all viable pipelines, especially in the spring. There was an incredible farm with a bartering system for poultry, but it’s no longer with us. Note: you’ve gotta acquire hens in pairs—they are 1. not solitary creatures 2. need a buddy to diffuse the hazing rituals of flock acclimation. See Pecking Order below.

  • Backyard chickens typically live between 5 and 8 years

    The evolution of a tender

  • The chicken you buy to eat for dinner is usually a broiler breed, like a Cornish Cross, that’s harvested around 6 weeks of age for its texture and tenderness and lowest potential ROI for feed/space needs.

  • If chickens are not factory farmed, they can spread their wings and spend their days scratching the ground and taking dust baths

  • Chickens tuck themselves into bed at night. By bed, I mean the rafters of the coop. Usually. Sometimes they find a nice low tree limb, or the rain barrel, or the top step of the neighbor’s pool to roost

    • Socializing tip: if you want to not be at an evening event a second longer, but haven’t yet mastered just leaving without a word, you can say you must tend to the life/death matter of locking up the girls

  • There are petsitters in the world. My girl Cynthia loves small doses of chickens, and even seems to delight in the occasional rat snake surprise

    Rat snakes will spare hens if they’re appeased with ritual egg sacrifices

Pecking Order

Within the flock, the word violent comes to mind. Like bison, there’s a reshuffling in ranks any time the norm is disrupted, either by addition or subtraction of hens. But it’s for good reason—the girls create a social structure, maintain peace, and reduce flock stress once they have the clarity of who has first dibs on food, preferred nesting boxes and the highest roosting spots.

We currently have four hens. My now pre-school-aged son is roughly third in the pecking order.
Current nemesis: Daisy, who’s clocked this child as a consistent snack-haver

In the broader world: hens are low on the food chain. Some known predators:

  • Raccoons. What beautiful, bloodthirsty, incredibly intelligent jerks. So cute. So violent. They return night after night after night and treat coops as all-you-can-destroy buffets. They don’t have the respect to properly eat a chicken. They seem to derive pleasure just from the torment.

    • Related: Penny, my 8-year-old-hen-matriarch, has only one eye as the result of a conflict with a raccoon back in 2019.

    • Worth noting: if you try to humanely live trap murderous raccoon(s), your just might trap a skunk

  • Foxes. Also cute. Also murderous. They at least have the courtesy of abducting the entire bird, but that’s not what you want to see leaping over your fence line mid-afternoon. A notable fox accomplishment: they have the power to bring my neighbor out of adolescent baseball career retirement. Special thanks to my community’s rock-throwing chicken security effort.

  • Hawks

  • Dogs

  • Other chickens

  • Do we acknowledge humans here? We must, right?

Red-shouldered hawk + snake snack

If you’re considering chicken tending, my pro tip:

Your coop needs a wire mesh floor.

Not chicken wire. Wire mesh.

There are so many relentless diggers in these parts, and it is sub-zero fun to hear a startled coop noise in the middle of the night and to bolt from bed to intervene/witness the horrors of nature being nature.

And also sub-zero fun to pick up poultry bits from an attack you didn’t hear, but do have to shield the eyes of small children from serving as witness.

Related: chicken math exists. It’s a known practice to have a couple hens more than you actually intend to keep because there’s a laundry list of reasons for attrition.

Fresh from the Cloaca

Also known as their vent, cloaca is the single external opening used for expelling waste, laying eggs, and mating. The Swiss Army Knife of hen anatomy.

  • Chickens lay roughly one egg a day. They should do this in their nesting boxes. Sometimes they forget where, and it becomes a daily Easter egg hunt until you remind them of a more reasonable place.

    1. Sunny in the act of dispelling an egg
    2. There it is
    3. Not pictured, raucous egg song to celebrate/scream about the almost daily process

    • Egg laying starts around 6 months old, peaks around year 3, and tapers off from there

    • Hens will go through phases of protest and pause their laying efforts. This can happen during a molt (feather changeover season), during extreme weather, when they’re feeling broody, and/or in response to external stressors

    • Eggs are different colors, based on the breed. Ameraucanas/Easter eggers lay blue eggs. Orpingtons and Barred Plymouth Rocks lay brown, the white store bought eggs are usually from White Leghorns

      And bantam hens lay small
      dba Stumpty Dumpty Eggs

    • The Chickens are Coming is a children’s book about urban chicken tending with an excellent chart of which breed lays which color egg

    • If you can’t humanly consume the daily egg from each member of your flock, you can use your e-bike as a delivery vehicle to hawk eggs to your book club buddies

    • The not-food-handler-approved context is that eggs can remain unwashed on the counter for up to a month because of their protective coating called bloom. A skelter helps track the first in, first out. Not trusting the bloom and plunking them in the refrigerator is also an option.

    • When it’s time to consume, wash and crack into a separate bowl so you don’t ruin everyone’s day with a bad egg

    • I once watched a hen lay an egg on the porch, heard it crack on impact, and had it fried and plated within four minutes. The supply chain can be extremely short.

Chickens will poop on everything you love.

In 2022, my then 3-year-old created this masterpiece, with the context: “This is all chicken poop on our patio right now!”
Related: a fenced apiary is good for us

  • Chickens poop roughly constantly

    • It makes for high quality fun, like Chicken Shit Bingo

    • It also makes for high quality gardening once it’s diluted through composting

    • This also makes for a repeating task of mucking the coops for some real chop wood/carry water joy

    • Salmonella bacteria can pass through droppings, so washing hands and indulging in chicken shoes that never cross the threshold of the home is mandatory

Pecking Hazards

Hens are opportunistic omnivores. Their favorites:

  • Toes, especially if in sandaled feet

  • Small snakes, to be fought over before being slurped as if spaghetti

  • Particularly noticeable freckles

  • Whatever your kids have leftover in their lunch box

  • Whatever snack your kids have in their hands, even if that’s a chicken nugget

  • Whatever you have in your hand, especially if you’re trying to sneak snacks during a backyard Zoom call

  • Absolutely anything you pay money for in a plant nursery

  • Bugs

  • Layer pellet, especially from 50 pound Tractor Supply hauls

    Seasons greetings from 2018 with Gizmo, the silkie

Of all of the potential futures shaped by a place called Filthy McNasty’s, who would have thought it would lead to a Mother’s Day Out teacher transcribing an insistent three-year-old’s accurate depiction of cloaca in action.

And so we built: containers for the nitrogen-rich droppings of our backyard buddies, a natural divide for a bees and chickens and their respective enemies, a protected space for the cut flower garden and for featherless back porch snacking. For grudges against hens. For a front-row seat to greenbelt’s nocturnal parade. For nature to be nature, and to indulge in it.

PSA

UPCOMING EVENTS

🗓️ June 4: Movies on the Lake: Dirty Dancing

🗓️ June 4: The Drop-In Music Series: Thursday night lounge on the lawn of The Long Center for live music + cityscape

🗓️ June 5: Birding at Pease Park: binoculars available to borrow

🗓️ June 5: Neon Paddle Night: the description includes the word vibe

🗓️ June 5: Music Under the Stars on the Capitol Mall

🗓️ June 5: Carpenter Hall Friday Co-Work: mix up your Friday afternoon

🗓️ June 6: The Ol’ Factory: Use your nose during this smell workshop. Also an option: Smells Bingo

🗓️ June 6: Snakes of Central Texas: for sure, there are rat snakes

🗓️ June 6: The Board Walks Bring a topic. Get some good convos.

🗓️ June 6: Clean Lady Bird Lake: by land, by sea, by sky

🗓️ June 6: First Annual Garden Book and Puzzle Sale: what better way to kick off National Garden Week

🗓️ June 6: Waterloo Greenway Phase II: Grand Opening: New portion of park alert! Ribbon cutting + festivities to celebrate

🗓️ June 6: Hutto Catfish Derby: The good kind of catfish. 2,000 of them.

🗓️ June 6: Cosmic Creepy Crawlies Night Hike: Not zero chance of spiders and scorpions

🗓️ June 7: Coffee + Cyanotype: Graze for plants, print them with the sun

🗓️ June 7: The Austin Symphony Concerts in the Park: Wind Ensemble

🗓️ June 7: Walk & Talk #7: Get in on some deep conversations

🗓️ June 7: Skateboarding squad, unite

🗓️ June 7: Yaupon Yap- Tasting and Foraging: I’m co-hosting this hands-on foraging walk + info session with Ian McCluskey of December Yaupon. Come join us!

🗓️ June 9: Butterfly Hike: High chance of whimsy

🗓️ June 9: Groundwater in Texas: Aquifers, Policy, and Management: Master Naturalists are providing a riveting Tuesday lunch break

🗓️ June 9 and 10: Blues on the Green: Get your live music fix at Zilker

🗓️ June 10: Clone Wars Lab Nights: Tune in to the live stream of this cross-city mycelial meetup. Expect spores.

🗓️ June 11: The Chocolate Experience: The first of a three-part series into the art of making chocolate, from bean to bar

🗓️ June 11: Austin Ruck Club: The crack of dawn is calling

🗓️ June 13: Lens on Nature: A Nature Preserve Photo Walk: a scavenger hunt of noticing

🗓️ June 16: Star Clusters, Double Stars, Galaxies at Reimers Observatory

🗓️ June 21: Reverse Brain Rot: I’m co-hosting this book + notebook + Barton Spring lounge with Zac Solomon of ATX Writing Club

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

We have two hummingbird babies in this lichen-laden nest.

That’s all for this week! 

In the meantime, I hope you peck your calendar until it yields some outdoor time.

-Nicole

OPTIONAL SIDE QUESTS

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🪵 Are you looking for a community of people in the startup ecosystem who go outside together? I’ve got you.

🪵 Are you sitting on a misogi-esque story? Spill.

🪵 I also write essay(s): this one is about witnessing a bison harvest.

🪵 Is this newsletter not your vibe? Forward it to your enemies to make them suffer too.

💰It’s safe to assume there are affiliate links, and I’ll monetarily benefit from any purchases you make. Hooray, capitalism! So far, this newsletter has generated $3.46 of cold hard cash. 💸

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