Eleven million households across the U.S. now own backyard chickens, according to the American Pet Products Association. Many of them are renting chickens as a workaround to an egg shortage and higher prices.
On a recent day in Fairfax, Virginia, the McHonett family of four added two temporary members.
Charlotte McHonett, 12, is the instigator of all this. Charlotte lives with her parents, Patrick and Jessica McHonett, and her 8-year-old brother Jack in a leafy suburb outside Washington, D.C.
“We were driving home from school one day, and a podcast was talking about this company called Rent The Chicken,” Charlotte said. “And I thought, ‘Hey, that would be cool to do.’”
Rent The Chicken offers rentals nationwide in states such as Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, Texas, and Virginia. Local partners, like Glenda Crum, deliver the hens, set up the coops, and show families how to dispose of poop.
For his part in convincing his parents to rent the chickens, young Jack ran the numbers for this project. He figured out how much his family would save by eating fresh eggs produced at home, instead of from the store, and compared it to the cost of renting chickens for half a year, including one coop, two bags of feed and two chickens.
“We saved a bunch of money,” Jack said, “because we don’t have to buy eggs because these give us free eggs.”
The kids like their eggs scrambled or sunny side up. Each of the two chickens lays one egg per day, which means one egg per kid, since the parents make smoothies for breakfast.
Now, the economics of renting are getting harder as consumer egg prices start to come down. Another option for families is to build a coop from scratch and buy their own hens.
Crum set up the coop in the McHonett’s backyard. The structure is shaped like a little red barn. Open the door, and there’s a kind of upper loft space.
Like all promising ventures, there may be complications. As it turns out, Crum said, these hens will not lay eggs immediately.
“It could take up to a month,” Crum said. “They’ve been moved, they’ve been upset, taken away from their place that they know. Like the kids, if they go to a new school, it takes time to make friends. It takes time to fit in.”
Then she warns of the risk to the hens’ safety. They can be vulnerable to predators.
“If you’re not in the backyard with them, don’t let ’em out of the coop,” Crum said. “Everybody likes chicken. Hawks, fox, coyotes, eagles, they all like chicken.”
And then, there’s a warning from public health experts: Backyard chickens can carry bird flu.
The virus spreads through wild animals like migrating geese. It’s in their saliva and feces. If a human or a critter step in infected goose poop and walks over to the McHonett family hens, the hens could get infected.
In fact, the first person in this country to die from bird flu was exposed to a backyard flock, according to officials in Louisiana.
But there aren’t a lot of wild birds that could be carriers near Virginia, Crum said.
“The bird flu is more with wild waterfowl,” Crum said. “So, if you have a big place and you have, you know, ducks and geese landing in their pond, that’s on your property, that’s where that can kind of happen.”
So, the McHonett family hens are probably safe. Jack and Charlotte are lucky they even got them: The Rent the Chicken company says inquiries for their hens are five times higher than normal.
In much of the country, these fine-feathered friends are sold out.
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Scott Tong produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Ciku Theuri. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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