Good advice here so far! If you Google 'keeping chickens in the city' you'll find a ton of pages with great advice also. :) I live in suburban Los Angeles and have a backyard flock. I have a coop for them at night and they roam the backyard by day. I do not allow them to jump fences or wander the neighborhood, and I keep the coop strictly clean so there is never an odor problem. You may have to trim the girls' wings at first, when they are young and are all horsepower and wing and not heavy enough to stay grounded. I always trim a new flock members' wings, by the time they have grown out again the bird has learned where it lives and doesn't roam. Make your yard the most atttractive to the chickens with lots of fresh food, water and nice nests and they'll prefer to stay home. Banties are the worst for wanting to explore, and as a general rule I trim anyone's wings whom I catch flying like a freakin' eagle. :) Usually the problem is in your cities zoning laws, and the issues with chickens fall under the noise ordinances (roosters). Also they must be housed so many feet from houses, etc. Some cities will be OK with a small number of hens, say 3, but will say 'No' to roosters because of the crowing. In my opinion hens are just as noisy or noisier during the day with all the 'Hey, I laid an egg!' cackling, but roos tend to start crowing in the pre-dawn hours. One thing you can do is to make sure and handle your birds daily--get them super tame and used to being picked up and petted. The less you allow them to run wild, the more they'll want to stay home, and if they DO hop a fence, they will be MUCH easier to catch. This also helps if they become sick or injured--trying to catch and help a wild chicken is nearly impossible. A few things you can do is check the home owners association guidelines to see if they specifically mention chickens one way or another. Check the cities zoning laws and ask the people at city hall if the homeowners association laws take precedence over city laws--I doubt if they do, so it may be that if the city says yes and the association says no--tough luck for the association! If neither one says no to chickens, talk to your neighbors--get them to sign a petition saying that they wouldn't have a problem with a small number of hens (offering fresh eggs and letting their kids come over to see the chickens is a great help in this area!) You can also see if you can get your home certified as a backyard wildlife habitat (check out the National Wildlife Federation's site), that might help protect the chickens. If you can use the birds in an educational manner (take them to local elementary schools and give a talk) that might help protect them, too since the animals are being used in an educational manner. You can also try to get them certified as therapy animals (you and your birds get some training, then you take them around to hospitals and visit patients) through the Delta Society (I'm going to see about this for some of my chickens). http://www.deltasociety.org/ So even with draconian statues, there may be ways around it, some kind of umbrella of protection for your birds. Be as sweet as pie to your neighbors and make good friends with all of the households surrounding yours and you'll most likely have no trouble from them by keeping chickens. :) Good luck! Velvet ~:>

Unfortunately I've had alot of experience with our dog killing drakes. I would shut the dog in the garage and let the poultry out to range. But DH let the dog out... and a couple other times it happened. The dog goes for the drakes, making me think it's an odor thing. The description of your drake is like what some of mine looked like. I would suspect the dog did it. Racoons are night creatures. Would the dog let another creature or other dog around his territory without putting up a fuss? I doubt a small animal would come close to where a dog is. Our dog wasn't a poultry killer until a little kid came to visit while I was gone, went into the poultry pen and started chasing all my geese and ducks. Dog got excited -- and has killed ever since. Now my poultry are sentenced to their pen because confining the dog doesn't work and I'm tired of dead drakes. Anyway, I don't think you should rule out the dog unless you see the other culprit in action.

I had read that too. I don't know if you'd really be doing the little guy any favors by clipping him instead of "doing the deed". I used to clip the flight feathers of my pet Lovebird so that I could catch him more easily. With shortened flight feathers birds can still use their wings for gliding, but they can't get much loft. And as soon as I adopted my kitty, I stopped clipping Newton so that he'd have a fighting chance to get away should he ever be accidentally out when the cat is around. Seems to me that clipping a HOSP would simply prolong what is sure to be a death sentence anyway - he'd be cat food in pretty short order, I think.

Interesting! I've never seen a wild turkey by the Hudson but it's definitely possible. I figured they belonged to a raptor since I see so many hawks up there, but I really don't know. I found them on August 30, and they were most likely dropped at night- the place was occupied until 6 pm the night before, and I found them at 8ish the next morning. I should mention that they got a little worn in transit from the porch to the ruler, but they were worn to begin with, and the porch had lots of disturbed foliage like there had been some kind of animal-related event there. Thanks again for your help!