The chicks finally arrived in the city.
That’s to say, the first set of baby chickens allowed by Elgin’s yearlong trial program permitting 15 homes to keep hens in backyard coops have arrived.
The proud owners are Pete and Katie Mangan, who live on the city’s west side along the 500 block of South Commonwealth Avenue. The Mangans drove two hours to Waterloo, Wis., to pick up four recently hatched chicks from Abendroth’s Hatchery.
An amateur photographer and member of the Elgin 360 Photo Club, Pete Mangan also intends to document the experience of raising chickens on his Instagram account, dependablepete.
“The plan is to illustrate how much fun this is. It’s not obtrusive. It’s a great idea,” Mangan said
The birds, which cost between $2.30 and $2.80 each, traveled to Illinois in a cardboard box lined with a nest that Katie Mangan said she held on her lap for the trip to Elgin.
The birds are living in a plywood box with a heat lamp to keep the pen between 90-100 degrees, pine shavings, a water bottle, a feeder designed to keep the birds from standing in their food, and grit for the chicks to help digest their diet.
“They’ll be in there for about 4-6 weeks,” Pete Mangan said. “If they get too big, I’ll build a bigger box.”
The couple chose four different breeds. A downy yellow chick is a Buff Orpington that will grow be the biggest of the quartet. A yellow and black Ameraucana will lay colored eggs. A shades of gray with yellow-white Australorp will lay light brown eggs that are non-porous, lessening the likelihood of salmonella. And a black and white Barred Rock will grow to have a striped pattern to her feathers.
Pete Mangan said he checked out “Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens” and “Storey’s Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds” from the Gail Borden Public Library to determine which breeds to get and how to care for them.
While getting the OK to have chickens in January, Mangan said he waited until the weather broke a bit to get his birds.
Last, October, by a 6-3 vote, the City Council moved along plans for a trial program for 2015 that would permit 15 homes to have chickens in the rear yards of their single-family dwellings.
Voting for the measure were Rose Martinez, Tish Powell, Carol Rauschenberger, Toby Shaw, and John Steffen. Against it were Rich Dunne, Terry Gavin, and John Prigge.
The Elgin plan allows for no more than four chickens per household and a prohibition on roosters. The slaughter of chickens is prohibited. Having hens is limited to single-family homes located in all-residential and residential conservation zoning districts.
The permit to build the coop was $60, and the license to keep the chickens was $60, Pete Mangan said.
Rebecca Abendroth said people like the Mangans now make up about a quarter of her family’s hatchery business, which offers chicks, ducklings and turkey poults and other baby birds from February through September.
“We’re seeing more and more people raising their own chickens,” Abendroth said. “It’s a wide range of people raising them. What they seem to have in common is wanting to know what they are eating and where it comes from.”
Abendroth said the hatchery runs through a list of things people need to know about keeping chickens prior to a sale. The birds can go outdoors when they are feathered out, typically in 4-6 weeks, she said, and they will be laying eggs in 18-22 weeks after their hatching.
“It’s husbandry when we talk to them,” she said.
As for the Mangans, they already keep a vegetable garden in their backyard, which is about 100 feet long by 50 feet wide. He also was an independent duty chef with the U.S. Coast Guard who was stationed in North Carolina.
A Schaumburg native, Pete Mangan and his wife moved to Elgin about eight years ago. They both work for the same insurance company in Schaumburg.
Helping advise them is a friend in West Dundee who has been keeping the birds since that village allowed qualifying homeowners there to do so.
Pete Mangan and his father, Mike, who is a retired carpenter, will build a coop from scratch, with materials costing about $100, Mangan said.
Should complaints arise related to the keeping of chickens, cruelty or unsanitary conditions, the city’s animal control officers would work to rectify the situation.
The Mangans’ pen will stand in the middle of the backyard, between two trees, enclosed to keep out predators but with room for the birds to move about in fresh air. The only time Mangan expects the chickens to be outside the coop will be when he is in his working in his big vegetable garden.
The couple have a dog and a cat, too, but Pete Mangan said he wasn’t concerned about them all coexisting . He’s basing that on visits to his chicken-keeping friend in West Dundee who also has a dog.
As for other Elgin chicken-keepers Christina Aagesen said she recently talked with 10 other permit holders, two of whom now have birds that are being kept by them by friends outside of Elgin.
Aagesen led the grassroots effort to allow chickens in Elgin. She and her husband moved to the 500 block of Covered Bridge Drive on the city’s southwest side about a year ago after living in Seattle, Napa, and Chicago, all of which allow residents to have the birds. She maintains the Facebook page Elgin Pollos Hermanas about the effort.
Aagesen said she received a permit, too, and intends to get her chicks from a farm in Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin, most likely one chosen from Craigslist postings.
“We’re hoping to hear from our homeowner’s association within a week or so, making sure what the city allows is okay with it before we get the chicks,” Aagesen said.
