Rachel Flynn, Justin Howlett and their children, Nell (7) and Bódhan (3), welcomed five unlikely new additions to their family early last year: a flock of chickens. The city chicks – Duchess, Roxy, Rosie, Gaia and Sahar – quickly became part of the furniture, making themselves at home in the family’s back garden in Dublin 8.
Raising chickens in an urban area can be “wholesome and very rewarding” but it doesn’t come without its challenges – predator control being one of the most pressing. Sadly, Sahar lost her life to a fox attack in January, despite the family’s best efforts to nurse her back to health.
Howlett stands in the garden on fox patrol as the chickens roam free from their coop. “We’ve had three fox attacks,” he says. “At first we were kind of nervous about them and then we started letting them out and they were basically free-range most of the day.”
A fox lives next door in the neighbour’s garden, only separated from theirs by a low wall. “So we’ve had the fox come in three times when we’ve just been inside the door. You hear squawking and stuff. Amazingly, we’ve interrupted all three attacks, but with the last one the chicken eventually succumbed a few days later.”
Flynn introduces the four remaining hens in the flock, which consists of a mixture of “family-friendly” breeds. Duchess, aka Duchess Eggan Markle, is a light Sussex. She and Rosie are taking a dust bath, while Gaia – named after the Greek earth goddess – wanders past. “They keep themselves very clean,” says Howlett.
Bódhan appears with Roxy in hand, a black rock breed and the “most pick-uppable” of the hens.
Clearly infatuated by her feathery friends, Nell says she loves their vivid colouring and “how they lay eggs for us”. Does she have a favourite? “It’s either Rosie or Roxy because they’re both multicoloured. If you go over to Roxy you’ll see a bit of green and a bit of orange. Orange around her neck and a bit on her back.”
Usually “one egg a day per chicken” is produced, “which is pretty good going”. “We give them to neighbours and Nell even set up a stall out the front on a sunny morning a few months ago,” says Howlett.
For Flynn, who runs Breathing Space, a wellness space in Dublin 8, the decision to keep chickens stemmed from a desire to become more in tune with food production and spark a conversation about this with her children.
“I think we’ve become very dissociated from food production ... If one in three households had chickens, then we wouldn’t need a commercial egg industry. We would consider ourselves conscientious carnivores and try to be vocal about the way we consume animal products. It’s a really nice springboard for talking about those kinds of things.”
After Sahar’s run-in with the fox, eating chicken went out the window for Flynn. “I can’t really eat chicken now, especially since the last chicken got injured,” she says, “I was looking after her and she was all wounded on her body.”
Reducing food waste is another significant benefit of keeping chickens. “One of the main things for us is the food waste,” says Flynn, sharing the recipe to the “chicken salad” they make every day – “which is not what it sounds like”.
“It’s a salad for the chickens as opposed to a salad of chicken,” she clarifies. It contains a medley of “stuff that would just be going in the compost bin” including “your peelings, your carrots, your egg shells”.
This is supplemented by some pellets bought in bulk from the same supplier they bought the chickens from: Freeway Poultry. After trying for “about eight months” to adopt rescue hens due to be culled from egg farms, the couple opted to go down the commercial route. Each hen cost them €18. Freeway Poultry schedules regular drop-offs at several locations around the country; Flynn and Howlett collected their chicks at Citywest.
“When we first got them they weren’t laying,” says Flynn. “They didn’t lay until they were with us about six weeks. Before they started laying they were doing so much poo. They still do a lot of poo but not as much.” Luckily, chicken manure can easily be transformed into a fertile compost.
“I was sort of chief poo manager,” says Howlett. “If you leave the poo in a pile it will smell, for sure. But once you set up the compost it very quickly turns into the compost soil. Just with some leaves, a little bit of extra soil, water and bits of food waste ... it doesn’t have to be that fussy. Now there’s zero smell from the compost.”
And are they noisy at all? “Only if they’re scared ... We kind of don’t understand this phenomenon, we don’t know if it’s a thing, but if one’s up laying an egg, then another might start clucking down on the ground as if announcing it or something,” says Flynn.
A clear pecking order quickly emerged within the group, with Duchess ruling the roost – “she’s definitely the alpha”. Howlett laughs. “When they were more free-range, if they ran out of food she’d come down if we were inside and peck at the glass to tell us to put more out.”
Sahar was introduced later than the others as “a fifth additional hen, so she was younger and when she arrived she was smaller than the others”.
“She was kind of getting bullied a bit, but then she made her way up the pecking order and she was probably number two to Duchess,” says Howlett. It was a learning curve in how chickens operate.
“We were surprised by how vicious they were when the new chicken came,” says Flynn. “Obviously all the language around pecking order and everything comes from that but they’re so hierarchical.”
Duchess started pecking the newbie, leaving her comb (the outgrowth on her head) bloodied. “We were thinking of separating her and then it kind of stopped,” says Flynn. “When Duchess, who was the boss, got attacked, the reason we knew something was wrong was because the chickens were pecking her ... If ever a chicken has a wound or anything you have to separate them from the other chickens because they will potentially peck them to death.”
Just over one year since getting their city chicks, Flynn and Howlett would advise anyone else considering raising their own to go for it.
“The joy that people get when you hand them the eggs is unmatched,” says Flynn, who hopes sharing their experience will induce a “contagion factor” and make others “realise it’s possible and desirable and not a really big undertaking”.
Barry Bryan, who also keeps free-range chickens at his home in Dublin’s North Strand, says “they’re a no-brainer”. For Bryan, who prefers a mainly plant-based diet which he supplements with eggs, the nutritional value of their yolks was part of the appeal.
“One of the problems with plant-based diets is the difficulty in getting B12″, something which his free-range eggs have in abundance.
Bryan was no stranger to rearing chickens, having kept some in rural settings before. “I had a flock when I lived in Spain ... and so I had a lot of experience about keeping them.”
Not only do they produce delicious eggs but chickens can double as free gardeners. “They’ll also weed your garden,” he says. Then there are the different personalities involved. Of Bryan’s three chickens, “one of them is quite adventurous and curious, she does let you pet her” whilst another “is scared, you go out and she’s hiding behind a bush”.
Similarly to Flynn and Howlett, Bryan found introducing a new member to the flock came with some teething issues. “When you take them from their home it’s a traumatic experience. The first two were together in their experience. I put them into a coop and I kept them in the coop, it helped them become habituated to this new home. When I introduced the third bird it was a problem ... she was a bit separate, I felt.”
After a few days the trio started to bond and “they’ve all now become one and become friendly with each other”.
Bryan ensures the birds are supplied with a steady stream of organic feed and “they also need some greenery. I have an arrangement with my local supermarket where they keep a box of vegetable scraps aside.
“They’re a no-brainer for people in the city, really,” adds Bryan. “To qualify for free-range I believe the amount of space for one [hen] is something like a metre squared. So it’s not really that much space that they need.”
