Tour De Cluck

A few weekends ago, Craig and I went on the annual Tour De Cluck, a fundraiser for the Davis Farm to School Connection.  It was a lovely day to take a bicycle tour of various backyard chicken coops.  There were a ton of people who signed up, in fact we ran into one lady who drove in from the Bay Area only to find out all the tickets were sold out!  Craig was quite the gentleman and offered to share his map/ticket with her so she could at least see some of the coops.
The tour started at the Davis farmer's market, which is a great market, runs year round and always has a large and interestingly diverse attendance.  We go occasionally to eat hotdogs and gyro's and people watch.

We got the day started off right with fresh omelets and feeling up cute chicks, you know, the feathered kind.

Our out of shape butts couldn't make it to all 16 coops, but the ones we did see ran the gamut from the most darling little cottages to more traditional coops.

yes, this is a chicken coop.

while the coop above wasn't as fancy as the first one, it did have a feature I saw repeated throughout the tour, an attached compost pile.  The chickens are allowed to get into the compost and actually help it along by scratching it up for bugs (introducing more oxygen to the mix) and helping to keep the overall population of bugs to a tolerable minimum.  Seems like a good deal for everyone, the homeowner doesn't have to turn the compost pile, the chickens get to eat the tasty bugs and all that good protein goes into making tasty eggs for the homeowner.

This chicken kept a close eye on all the visitors.  Perhaps they are not as dumb as I always thought, being a city slicker and all, I was surprised how genuinely curious this one seemed about my camera.  And staring into those vaguely reptilian eyes, I could not help but think about the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, which were frighteningly smart critters.

My favorite coop, below, reminded my of something from Tolkien's Middle Earth that Hobbits might build.  I especially loved this coop door made of gently curved wood and sticks.

This was the largest of the coops we saw, about 20' by 6'.  There was enough room for rabbits and chickens to peacefully co-exist.

all in all, it was a relaxed ride through pleasant neighborhoods and the people were very nice to let all these strangers into their backyards.  We are now considering whether we could somehow turn our little finch aviary into a bigger chicken coop.  Time will tell if my new, maybe temporary, infatuation with the idea turns into a City Biddy.