Backyard Checkens

My dog has re-opened an old world for me, my neighborhood.  Truly for decades, I haven't walked in my own neighborhood.  It is too hot in summer and too cold in winter and there are so many beautiful places away from my neighborhood that I prefer, such as the Pine Barrens, Pakim Pond, Whitesbog - treasures of beauty and history, so why would I walk around Hartka, and Gaskill, and Green?  There aren't even many trees.

But, my rescued dog is almost uncontrollable and emotionally volatile and we have been working for a month on leash walking.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, she had been in the Camden County Shelter for over a month, and before that, on the streets with her male partner dog.  She had been used for breeding and puppy selling and then abandoned when the people who had her broke up and moved on.  They left the dogs they had exploited in the yard to starve or die of heat exhaustion and thirst.  However, dogs being the survivalists that they are, they escaped the yard and were found by animal control running free on Uma Thurman Road in Sewell.  They were rounded up and taken to Cam. Co. Shelter where the workers named them Uma and Thurman.  Thurman was adopted immediately but Uma languished for over a month until I met her and fell in love with her.

So being unused to being walked on the leash, she was too freaked out by the park and we were forced to limit ourselves to our neighborhood and it caused me to get to know neighbors I hadn't spoken to in years, and new neighbors I had never met before.

Today, Uma was trying to get into a yard and I saw she was interested in chickens.  A young woman named Katherine was keeping watch over her chickens.  Another neighbor another day had recommended I look at our Facebook neighborhood page and I saw there that 33 people in my town are enrolled in a "Backyard Chickens" program.  Stopping to talk to Katherine about hers, I discovered that only 3 permits were issued in a pilot testing program and Katherine had one.  She raised the chickens from pullet to full grown but they hadn't laid any eggs yet.

I asked her if she knew the 'poultry history' of South Jersey and she did not but she was familiar with these names:  Brotmanville, Rosenhayne, Norma, and Woodbine.  All these towns were evolved from early Russian Jewish villagers resettled from their homeland to New Jersey by Philadelphia philanthropists saving them from the pogroms in Russia.  More on that later, I am getting ready to meet a friend for a day in Millville on Capt. Dave's boat and lunch at Wildflowers Vegan, with a visit to the Art Gallery there.

Happy Trails!