CITY PEEPS
Urban coop tour shows chickens flocking throughout Pittsburgh
Dozens of hens plus ducks, goats and rabbits frolic and flourish on two urban mini farms and ordinary-looking homes in a halfdozen Pittsburgh neighborhoods. Last Sunday, 10 sets of owners opened their doors to share their unique lifestyles with people who flocked to the 10th annual Pittsburgh Chicks in the Hood Urban Chicken Coop Tour.
The Chick Inn at Choderwood in Highland Park has 17 hens and three ducks on a property filled with old growth trees and many raised beds planted with vegetables and beautiful hostas and other perennials. There’s also a meditation hut and a fish pond on the nearly 1-acre farm that sits high above the Allegheny River.
Jody Noble-Choder and her husband, Steve Choder, live there in a brick house built in 1907 for the lock master of the Army Corps of Engineers. Lock No. 2 is still there near the Highland Park Bridge, but the Army sold the house in 1957. The Choders bought the property in 2001 and started keeping chickens 10 years ago.
Choderwood and one other house are sandwiched between the lock and the long-closed Pittsburgh Asphalt Plant.
“We feel this property is a part of Pittsburgh history, and we’re happy to share it with the public,” said Ms. Noble-Choder.
She’s a retired corporate lawyer, and her husband is retired from UPMC, where he was director of the narcotic addiction program.
Ms. Noble-Choder was the “chick in charge” of the tour, which featured 10 coops in east and south Pittsburgh neighborhoods, including Regent Square, Squirrel Hill, Lawrenceville, Stanton Heights, Brookline and South Side.
Keeping female chickens is legal in the city and in many suburbs. But male chickens — roosters — are outlawed in most municipalities. Hens don’t need them to lay eggs.
Ms. Noble-Choder says she gets 400 eggs per year from her “girls,” who have creative names including Vera Wing, Mother Clucker, Buffy the Worm Slayer, Margaret Hatcher and Hillary Rodham Chicken.
Gene and Stacy Vestel of Upper St. Clair made the tour with their young sons because they want to get chickens and want to learn how to care for them.
A common thread runs through the coop tour: These people clearly love their hens, which they say are charming, affectionate and amusing pets. Coop keepers also love their fresh eggs but readily admit it would be much cheaper to
buy eggs at the grocery store. Hens live six to 10 years, and their egg production drops with age.
Julia Kemp spends eight hours per day, every day, caring for five hens, six goats and about 20 rabbits at her house in East Pittsburgh. About six years ago she left Highmark, where she had worked for 25 years. She jokes that she “retired for about an hour, and then I got bored.”
Mrs. Kemp and her husband, Brad, purchased several vacant lots to expand their property. She learned how to build three chicken coops, two goat houses, a fish pond, a “she shed,” a treehouse for her grandson and a house for 20 rabbits. “The goats keep opening the door to the rabbit house, so rabbits are all out here running around,” Mrs. Kemp said.
The chickens come in at night, which is prime hunting time for raccoons, foxes and coyotes. More than one urban chicken farmer has lost hens to predators and an occasional dog, but all have learned how to make their coops predator-proof.
Chicken that are “free range” during the day are happy chickens, and they eat lots of insects, including garden slugs and ticks that carry Lyme disease.
Chris and Lauren TerreBlanche have 22 chickens of their own at home in Washington, Pa. They joined the tour “to see how other people do it,” Mr. Terre-Blanche said. Daughters Leona, Hazel, Vera and Olive especially enjoyed petting the goats.
The $20 tour tickets were a fundraiser for Tree Pittsburgh, a nonprofit that plants trees and educates the public about the importance of maintaining the urban forest. Past tours have drawn up to 500 people, but this year’s had only 50, presumably because of competition from the Three Rivers Arts Festival and PrideFest.