Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter Page A
Authors: Novella Carpenter
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dear.
“OK,” I said, “I’ll try to do something about that.” But what? Give the chicken a talking to? Train it not to go outside our gates? In Seattle, our chickens roamed the streets with impunity. They had the run of our neighbors’ backyards, and they sometimes walked down the sidewalk. But Seattle had more of a laid-back, suburban vibe. The houses weren’t quite so close together, and the neighbors were less likely to be armed. None of our Seattle chickens had ever, as far as I knew, made it into someone’s living space.
There was more going on than just impolite birds, though. Everyone was on edge that summer because of avian flu. It was killing people in Vietnam, where many of the people on our street had friends and family. Clucking my tongue, I went to the World Health Organization’s Web site to get the skinny. “All evidence to date indicates that close contact with dead or sick birds is the principal source of human infection with the H5N1 virus,” the WHO warned. “Especially risky behaviors identified include the slaughtering, defeathering, butchering and preparation for consumption of infected birds. In a few cases, exposure to chicken faeces when children played in an area frequented by free-ranging poultry is thought to have been the source of infection.”
Dear lord, chicken poop could actually kill someone! It wasn’t a good time to have twenty chickens in our backyard.
And yet I wasn’t that worried. H5N1 hadn’t reached American shores yet. My chickens couldn’t pick up avian flu, and they couldn’t give it to our neighbors, until the virus reached the United States. I promised our Vietnamese neighbor that I would get rid of all the poultry the moment H5N1 hit North America.
Every week, though, news sources threatened that avian flu was coming. Wild migrating birds, we were told, would bring the disease through Alaska and then to the mainland, where avian flu would kill countless birds and, eventually, maybe a human.
I bought some netting and stretched it over the chicken area so the birds couldn’t get out. But within a few hours, they discovered an opening in my avian-flu shield and were back out in the lot, in the street, terrorizing the neighborhood.
A pandemic on the 2-8 seemed wildly fantastical, and yet I was starting to have my doubts. Especially after I read a New York Times article entitled “Avian Flu: The Uncertain Threat, Q and A: How Serious Is the Risk?” Question three asked: If bird flu reached the United States, where would it appear? The answer: “Although health officials expect bird flu to reach the United States, it is impossible to predict where it may show up first, in part because there are several routes it could take. If it is carried by migrating birds, then it may appear first in Alaska or elsewhere along the West Coast.”
I turned to question five, “How will I know if I have bird flu?” Symptoms, the article said, include flulike feelings: fever, headache, fatigue, aches and pains. But instead of getting better, the patient gets worse and ends up dying, in most cases from acute pneumonia.
Feeling a little congested, I sat at my table reading this news. I looked outside and saw the chickens marching around the lot. Chasing one another, pooping copiously. Suddenly they seemed sinister, out of control. Was a dozen eggs a day worth all this drama?
And so I became a pusher. A chicken pusher. Everyone in our neighborhood had a hustle, and this became mine. Chickens are, after all, the gateway urban-farm animal. I wanted others to join in the fun. “You’ll get tons of eggs,” I would whisper to my coworkers, “lots of fertilizer.” No one in my neighborhood seemed interested, but Willow knew of some families. And then I posted an ad on Craigslist.
I had never seen such a parade of oddballs. A surfer guy who wanted to give his wife urban chickens as a tenth-anniversary gift. A chubby middle-schooler who translated for her Spanish-speaking
“OK,” I said, “I’ll try to do something about that.” But what? Give the chicken a talking to? Train it not to go outside our gates? In Seattle, our chickens roamed the streets with impunity. They had the run of our neighbors’ backyards, and they sometimes walked down the sidewalk. But Seattle had more of a laid-back, suburban vibe. The houses weren’t quite so close together, and the neighbors were less likely to be armed. None of our Seattle chickens had ever, as far as I knew, made it into someone’s living space.
There was more going on than just impolite birds, though. Everyone was on edge that summer because of avian flu. It was killing people in Vietnam, where many of the people on our street had friends and family. Clucking my tongue, I went to the World Health Organization’s Web site to get the skinny. “All evidence to date indicates that close contact with dead or sick birds is the principal source of human infection with the H5N1 virus,” the WHO warned. “Especially risky behaviors identified include the slaughtering, defeathering, butchering and preparation for consumption of infected birds. In a few cases, exposure to chicken faeces when children played in an area frequented by free-ranging poultry is thought to have been the source of infection.”
Dear lord, chicken poop could actually kill someone! It wasn’t a good time to have twenty chickens in our backyard.
And yet I wasn’t that worried. H5N1 hadn’t reached American shores yet. My chickens couldn’t pick up avian flu, and they couldn’t give it to our neighbors, until the virus reached the United States. I promised our Vietnamese neighbor that I would get rid of all the poultry the moment H5N1 hit North America.
Every week, though, news sources threatened that avian flu was coming. Wild migrating birds, we were told, would bring the disease through Alaska and then to the mainland, where avian flu would kill countless birds and, eventually, maybe a human.
I bought some netting and stretched it over the chicken area so the birds couldn’t get out. But within a few hours, they discovered an opening in my avian-flu shield and were back out in the lot, in the street, terrorizing the neighborhood.
A pandemic on the 2-8 seemed wildly fantastical, and yet I was starting to have my doubts. Especially after I read a New York Times article entitled “Avian Flu: The Uncertain Threat, Q and A: How Serious Is the Risk?” Question three asked: If bird flu reached the United States, where would it appear? The answer: “Although health officials expect bird flu to reach the United States, it is impossible to predict where it may show up first, in part because there are several routes it could take. If it is carried by migrating birds, then it may appear first in Alaska or elsewhere along the West Coast.”
I turned to question five, “How will I know if I have bird flu?” Symptoms, the article said, include flulike feelings: fever, headache, fatigue, aches and pains. But instead of getting better, the patient gets worse and ends up dying, in most cases from acute pneumonia.
Feeling a little congested, I sat at my table reading this news. I looked outside and saw the chickens marching around the lot. Chasing one another, pooping copiously. Suddenly they seemed sinister, out of control. Was a dozen eggs a day worth all this drama?
And so I became a pusher. A chicken pusher. Everyone in our neighborhood had a hustle, and this became mine. Chickens are, after all, the gateway urban-farm animal. I wanted others to join in the fun. “You’ll get tons of eggs,” I would whisper to my coworkers, “lots of fertilizer.” No one in my neighborhood seemed interested, but Willow knew of some families. And then I posted an ad on Craigslist.
I had never seen such a parade of oddballs. A surfer guy who wanted to give his wife urban chickens as a tenth-anniversary gift. A chubby middle-schooler who translated for her Spanish-speaking
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