Hens hanging around in the backyard

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BOULDER - For 98-year-old Hilda Rabe, the new neighbors in the backyard remind her of her late husband. For 3-year-old Noah Tice-Kepner, they just "feels funny."

Urban Hens is the Boulder-based group that brought them and eight chickens together on Tuesday at the Shawnee Gardens Assisted Living Residence. The coop housing the chickens was built by University of Colorado at Boulder students. Urban Hens is working with the Children, Youth and Environments Center for Research Design at CU and a private grant to help teach sustainability to children by placing chickens near neighborhood and school gardens.

"How can you be truly sustaining and that is by reusing the waste in any system and keeping it inside the system instead of continuing to consume and throw it off," said Wynn Martens, the co-founder of Urban Hens. "People become interested for different reasons. Some people are concerned with the humane treatment of the chickens. Other people are interested in the nutritional value. Other people really are interested in the educational component, so we want to support all those."

The children like Noah go to the Blossom Pre-School across the alley from Shawnee Gardens. Their curriculum will include responsibilities such as feeding and partly taking care of the chickens. Many of their lunch and dinner scraps will go to the chickens. The chickens' waste meanwhile will help fertilize the Shawnee Gardens garden. That garden's products will be eaten by both parties as will the eggs the chickens lay.

"By involving children in a hands-on, practical solution that addresses issues related to local food, climate change, peak oil and conservation, we put them in a position to control a piece of their own world," Martens said. "Backyard hens open the door for broader understanding of these critical issues. The hens help us think about what we eat, what we throw away, where the rest of our food is coming from and how a closed-loop system works at the most basic level."

Urban Hens has already erected a coop in a neighborhood in Boulder. Numerous cities around the metro area have restrictions against backyard chickens but Martens says those positions may be softening as prices rise and people look to become more conscious about their own efforts to protect the earth. They are currently working with parents in the Park Hill neighborhood in Denver to set up a garden and a chicken coop there.

For more information about Urban Hens, visit http://www.urbanhens.org/.

For more information about Children, Youth and Environments Center for Research and Design at the University of Colorado, visit http://www.cudenver.edu/ACADEMICS/COLLEGES/ARCHITECTUREPLANNING/DISCOVER/CENTERS/CYE/Pages/index.aspx.