CLUCK the Chicken Store was one year old on Sunday. We celebrated with a fabulous marble cake with raspberry frosting from the New Glarus Bakery after Giene Keyes once again amazed everyone by demonstrating clicker training with her chickens. We will post some video of that event soon.

Birthdays aren’t really about getting a year older. They’re about the people you meet and the things you learn in 12 months. CLUCK may be all about backyard chickens, but it is the chicken people we have met who have made the store experience so gratifying to us. Seriously, CLUCK couldn’t have happened without our friends and supporters. We hesitate to even try to name names because we’re sure to forget someone and that would be too sad.

We are proud that we have been able to mentor some customers who didn’t have chickens and now have become experienced chicken keepers. At the same time, we have learned volumes from the many visitors who know so much more about chickens than we do and who share their years of experience with us. We’re chicken enthusiasts, not chicken experts. We also want to thank the regular customers who stop in every few weeks for another bag of chicken feed or scratch grain. We feel like they and their chickens are part of our extended family.

CLUCK couldn’t happen without our employees, Barb and Courtney, who contribute so much energy and creativity. Many thanks to our bookkeeper, Bev, for teaching us all the stuff we didn’t know, and our IT department, otherwise known as Answer IT, for keeping us up and running. And Janette at Aurora Sky Design for creating our stylish and functional website.

We have to thank brother Tom Troller for the interior design of the store and Dana Dupler for the first-class restoration of what was a derelict building. We can’t count how many customers have told us they think the store is beautiful.

We couldn’t have done it without our many talented artists, especially Cynthia Quinn, who designed CLUCK’s own tea towels and baby onesies. It is great to be surrounded by beautiful works of art every day and we’re so happy that some of these paintings have sold and gone to appreciative new homes. It's a tough sell to present fine art in a feed store but we are cautiously optimistic that it will get easier over time. Speaking of works of art, let’s not forget our coop builders -- Jeff Jicinsky, Penny Lund, Chuck Ostrander and Noah Riniker. The coop garden, and our resident chickens -- Buffy, Zelda, Minnie and Paula -- have proven a great attraction in the last 12 months (even in the winter!).

We are also indebted to our many seminar presenters and subject matter experts who have shared their knowledge of poultry and local foods with us and our customers in the past year: Twain and Heather Lockhart, Dr. Stephanie Hirsbrunner, Giene Keyes, Terese Allen, Jake Tollakson, Melissa Leonard, Dr. Julia Naber, Ron Kean from UW-Extension, Erica Solis and Joel Helge, and Dr. Amanda Pike.

We also have been surprised and gratified by the enormous amount of support we have gotten from our fellow business-owners in Paoli, especially Theresa Abel and Tim O’Neill at the Artisan Gallery and Creamery Café, Richard Judd at Zazen Gallery, Cheri at Paoli Bread and Brat and Bill Hastings, who we think of as the unofficial “mayor” of Paoli. And, of course without the fine burgers and pizza from Paoli Pub and Grill, we would have starved to death in the last year! It's been fun, and we're delighted to be on to our second year.

Maybe genetic scientists in England have more free time than American scientists. Whatever the reason, a few researchers at the University of Nottingham took a fancy to the fancy blue eggs produced by Araucanas - Ameraucanas or Easter-eggers as we are more likely to have around here - and came up with a surprising finding:

The serious implication of their finding is that they couldn’t have done it without the efforts of heritage breeders over hundreds and even thousands of years to preserve ancient lines of Gallus domesticus. The next discovery may not be so inconsequential, but may lead to a health breakthrough for chickens, or even humans. If you have backyard heritage breeds, you play at least a small part in maintaining the diversity of this great gene pool just by collecting and sustaining your little flock.

Darwin was inspired in his evolutionary insights by pigeon breeders. Who knows if chicken breeders might also inspire a great thought or two?

Of course, there's no such thing as a perfect chicken coop, just as there's no such thing as a perfect craft beer. It's a matter of personal taste. That said, we think the coop that arrived Friday night in our coop garden at CLUCK the Chicken Store is pretty close.

It's definitely designed for the back yard, not the farm. It's sized for four birds, but could accommodate six. It has hardware cloth top and bottom for maximum predator protection - no chicken wire here - and the house has nifty clean-out trays so it takes less than a minute to dump the old bedding in the compost and add new bedding. No scraping or scrubbing.

We get a lot of old-timers who come into the store who remember with deep disgust having to clean the family farm coop when they were children. Of course in those days they might have had a hundred birds and cleaned the coop a couple times a year. No kidding it was smelly and disgusting, but those days are gone.

This isn't a chicken tractor. You can't hitch it up to a tractor and drag it around, but it does have handles so you can move it around the yard in case you want to do that. The house and the cage even snap apart with a couple of clicks so you can remove the house from the cage. That makes it light enough for two people to move. And we think it's pretty enough that the neighbors will like it too. What do you think?

Clicker training at CLUCK the Chicken Store

Giene Keyes gave an absolutely inspirational demonstration last night on clicker training for chickens, or more properly, operant conditioning. She has promised to do a return engagement on August 25 so we can see what progress her birds have made in the next month. She’s working with young birds, so their learning curve should be quite steep. Giene showed us how Feathers could be taught to peck at the green target and ignore the purple and orange targets. As for us, we would just be happy if we could get them to go into the coop when we want them to and maybe not poop on the porch.

Giene taught Feathers to peck a colored target

For most dog and horse trainers, like Giene, clicker training chickens is just an exercise – a way of getting better at a fundamental training skill. Chickens have very short attention spans, Giene explained, so you must be quick on the click to reinforce positive behaviors.

Giene and Susan with Feathers

Giene is the proprietor of Dog Face LLC and her main business is dog training, but she insisted that she had fun learning to train her birds. We are looking forward to seeing her on August 25.