Rose Berger woke up Sunday morning to a rather unexpected sight in the alley behind her Columbia Heights home. About 8 a.m., workers in the alley behind the 1100 block of Fairmont Street NW spotted a jet-black chicken waddling through.
The sight of a stray fowl strolling through their neighborhood got Berger and her neighbors talking and acting. One resident tossed the a slice of bread to the chicken, which looked Berger says looked parched and hungry.
When no one claimed the bird, Berger says she scooped it up and took it to her back yard. She’s got some experience with the species; growing up in the suburbs of Sacramento, Calif., her family often kept up to 30 chickens on their property.
“She looked scared,” Berger says of the chicken, which she suspects is a hen that walked off a nearby house. She meets me in the mulch-covered garden behind her row house, where the chicken is scuttling about, picking at the food Berger has left out.
Urban chicken farming, while burgeoning in other cities, remains prohibited in D.C., though people have long fought to make it legal. In 2009 Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) proposed legislation that would undo the regulations forbidding poultry within 50 feet of any building. The measure failed, and the anti-chicken rules remain on the books to this day.
Berger says she hasn’t raised any chickens since moving to D.C., but she would definitely consider it the city changed its rules. As for the one that currently lives in her yard and under her back porch, she surmises it might have wandered off Saturday night during the intense thunderstorm that produced high winds and driving rain.
“I thought maybe the severe storm on Saturday night blew open someone’s gate or knocked down a fence and it escaped,” she says.
Berger worries just a bit though that the chicken might not be used for agrestic purposes, though. She says she’s heard stories—and indeed, authorities charged a D.C. resident last October for running a cockfighting ring—but that this bird does not appear to have any markings of such a violent life.
Until someone claims the chicken, Berger, an editor at Sojourners, is taking care of it, feeding it birdseed and unsalted crackers, along with any bugs and worms it finds in her garden. She posted a notice to the Columbia Heights Yahoo! Group and hopes someone will come forward. If not, she knows a chicken farm in Takoma Park, Md., that could serve as a good home for the bird.
“It’s legal there,” she says.
