We spent yesterday in the hot sun, working on our chicken coop. It is about 90% finished. Sylvia researched what chickens need and got together with our neighbor Don, who is an architect. Don designed the coop, and his design was corrected by his father-in-law Dave, who is a contractor. As you can imagine, this is a rather fancy residence for the creatures. (We have 12 of them, shared between 3 households, and expect one or two to become roosters. We'll have to get rid of the roosters, since we're not allowed to keep them in the city.) We're trying to decide what color to paint it, and also what to call it. I've suggested Avian Arms or Henrietta Hilton, but Sylvia says those are hotel names, not permanent residence names. I know there used to be all-female residences in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but I can't remember any of their names. Any suggestions?
As I understand, chickens originated in east and southeast Asia. Per Wikipedia, they were used in Egypt for cock fighting as early as 1400 BCE, and were known as "the bird that lays every day," but not widely bred until around 300 BCE. I recently went to an exhibit on ancient Egypt at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and in that exhibit it said that the ancients didn't raise chickens. The Egyptians painted all kinds of scenes of daily life in their tombs--baking bread, hunting wild birds, brewing beer, even circumcising a guy--and we haven't found any any tomb paintings of chickens. Still, it seems odd that the ancient Egyptians, clever as they were, would just use "a bird that lays every day" for cockfighting for 1700 years.
Just to be on the safe side, though, I have the characters in my novel eating duck, goose, pigeon, roasted song birds, wild turtle eggs, and wild bird eggs, but not chicken or chicken eggs.
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