(photo from the West Seattle Blog!)

On Sunday, Scott and I volunteered at the Sustainable West Seattle Festival. I think we were the only booth not staffed by a business or nonprofit – just the two of us with our chicken passion. I got a little worried when we arrived to the colourful banners at all the other tables, but we put up a hasty hand-drawn sign, replete with cartoon chicken, and the people came anyhow.

I gave the first talk at the Community Workshop tent. Scott thinks I had the best turn out of the day! I had prepared slides in case it was rainy and I had a small enough audience for my laptop, but the sun came out and a few minutes into my talk I had 30 or more listeners. I passed around handouts and talked for perhaps 25 minutes, with another 20 for Q&A. It was exhilarating to be able to talk about chickens to an interested audience – nothing but chickens for 45 minutes! I’d love to give this talk again, and if I do I will have more visuals!

Scott meantime manned the booth where we had a carton of fake nest box eggs, my eggmen, printed resource sheets, and a running slide show of our chicken photos on my laptop. We met lots of nice people, about an equal number of chicken owners and non-owners. Lots of questions we could answer and some we could not (Q: What to do about dominance hierarchy fights with new introducees? A: Nothing?, Q: How about raising ducks? A: Uhh, get a book from the library?).

Very excitingly, we started, and had great response to, a list for a West Seattle Tour of Chicken Coops. Seattle Tilth has an annual Coop Tour, but it is spread across the whole city and focuses on fancier setups. I was disappointed by it. I wanted to bike to coops in my area, meet neighbours, and see the variety of ways I might raise chickens. Well, West Seattle isn’t even on the coop tour this year, so we’ll just do our own in our own way. If you want to host or attend the tour this summer, leave me a note!!