Is this some cruel joke? With everything else coming at us, now we’re supposed to start raising backyard chickens, too? Apparently.
In early March, with egg prices soaring and shortages so bad even Whole Foods shoppers have been affected, President Trump’s secretary of agriculture took to Fox News to blithely offer a solution: Americans should get their own flocks.
It’s a “silver lining,” the official, Brooke Rollins, said.
Yay!
The CDC is reporting that the avian flu has already infected 70 people in the United States and led to one death, and experts have said the possibility of a human pandemic is no longer “remote.” As you might guess, some people are not eager to get closer to birds, no matter the “free” eggs (free, if you don’t count time, money, and possible plague).
And yet, bookings at Rent The Chicken, a Pennsylvania-based rental chicken firm with a Boston-area presence, tell a different story. They’re up nearly 25 percent from this time last year.
“People want to take back some control over their food sources,” said Jenn Tompkins, the company’s cofounder.
A reliable brunch supply is important, of course. And if you talk with chicken people, you quickly grasp that arrangements that start out as merely transactional — I feed you, you feed me — often deepen. Give a person wearing a T-shirt that declares them “Fluent in Fowl Language” an opening, and prepare to hear about:
The pleasure of snuggling with a Speckled Sussex. “Chicken math,” which holds that once you get one flock, inevitably you’ll fall so in love you’ll get another and another. And, perhaps their favorite topic: their chickens’ sense of humor.
I have never shared a laugh with a chicken, I admit. But I am someone with a pet, a goldendoodle with a dry wit. So when I learned how close people get to their birds — naming them, knitting them sweaters, looking forward to seeing them after work — it made me think about how scared I’d be if dogs were at risk.
There have been nine positive cases of bird flu in backyard flocks in Massachusetts since the first case was detected, in March of 2022, according to the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, with two of the cases coming this year. The infections are typically due to a backyard flock coming into contact with wild birds that had bird flu, a spokesperson said, and require the flock be destroyed.
I figured that such worries would be rife in chicken circles, and they are — except for the backyard chicken conspiracy theorists, who think that bird flu is a COVID-like hoax, mounted by the mainstream media or the government or shadowy forces trying to prevent people from being self-sufficient. Or something.
Missi Salzberg, the owner of Chickadee Seed & Feed in Walpole, says she gets questions “on the regular” from customers eager to learn best practices. “They say, ‘I don’t want to lose my girls, I don’t want to lose my ladies,’” she said. “They don’t call them ‘chickens.’”
Owners have stopped letting their “girls” free range. They’re covering their coops with dropping-proof tops to protect their flocks from migrating birds. They’re not even taking in needy chickens.
On the South Shore, Caylee Kozak, a senior communications specialist with the Gemological Institute of America, is so serious about “biosecurity,” that when her parents recently came to chicken sit, she emphasized — and emphasized again — that they each needed to bring a bird-coop-only pair of boots.
Any eggs they collected, she instructed, should go immediately into the refrigerator, spending no time on the counter. She didn’t want her cats anywhere near them, she said. Touching surfaces contaminated with animal secretions or excretions is a risk factor for bird flu, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s website, which also, thankfully, reports that “consuming properly prepared and cooked (or pasteurized) products is safe.”
Bird flu and egg shortages are getting all the attention. But those issues are just the tip of a subculture that can be, according to Tompkins of Rent The Chicken, kind of “crazy.”
Her driver’s license identifies her as Jennifer Tompkins, but if you ask her for her name, she’ll give it as “Homestead Jenn Tompkins” — and kind of insist you use the honorific.
When I asked Her Homesteadliness how she got the idea for the company, she responded that her husband was “the visionary.”
In the Boston area, $600 at Rent The Chicken gets you two hens for the season (five or six months), a coop, organic feed, tutorials, access to a help line — and about a dozen eggs a week.
If you “chicken out,” Tompkins said, allowing herself a little chicken humor, you can return the birds, no judgment. Conversely, if the experience is good, you can also name the birds and rent the same ones next year — or you could buy the flock!
Meanwhile, in the popular imagination, and indeed in reality, one of a chicken’s most defining characteristics is squawking. But that’s not the whole story, said David Herlihy, a lawyer from Newton who, along with his wife and many others, got chickens during the pandemic.
“There’s something very zen about it,” he said.
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.