Carl Carlson

The first stop on my road to owning chickens, was a call from an unknown number. When I picked up all I could hear was a bunch of chirping and an irritated postal employee telling me that my chickens had arrived. Never one to shirk my professional duties, I worked the rest of the day and stopped by the post office on the way home.

My home is the suburban hellscape of the Baltimore-Washington-Annapolis triangle, and, by chance or by choice, it has been for the better part of my adult life. While not everything from the Baltimore-Washington metro area is terrible (For example, my wife has called it home for her entire life.), the idea of city living -- particularly long-term -- was getting me down.

The solution? Backyard chickens.

Not that I love eggs or chicken or even birds for that matter.

I grew up in South Dakota (the Wild West if you ask some people), and I didn’t spend much time around chickens, but my wife was supportive, and the next thing we knew, we were on a website, picking out birds -- pullets as the website called them -- and starting down a new road.

Our chickens had arrived, by mail, in a slotted cardboard box.

I was surprised when I picked them up, and this disbelief came in spite of my having paid $35 online, having diligently selected birds with all the scientific precision of throwing darts, and having bought everything I thought I needed to house my new chicks.

After their trip from Texas, they spent the first few weeks of their lives in a translucent plastic tub from Wal-Mart. One morning, my wife found three of them rim-sitting and trying, apparently, to decide what lay out there beyond the great plastic wall.

In much the same way, I have taken an interest in food issues beyond backyard chickens and explored many of them from Veterans farming to Joel Salatin and from local feed stores to community supported agriculture.

I plan to continue to expand the breadth an