If you’ve ever picked up a carton of eggs at the grocery store and had to pause for a few seconds to consider whether your morning scramble ritual was really worth the sticker shock, you’re perhaps only a few short chicken influencer videos away from sliding into the backyard chicken lifestyle. The birds can be found in almost every neighborhood in Houston, from River Oaks to the East End, and there’s good reason: the city has rather lax laws regarding owning them. It’s also quite a bit of fun—even if it won’t actually end up saving you money in the long run.

If Facebook is any indication, backyard chicken evangelists are on the rise. One local group, Houston Area Backyard Chickens, has over 8,000 members who post about their successes and failures with their flocks, offering each other advice and encouragement. With names like Dutch or Pidgie, these avian city slickers are viewed more as family members than simple egg producers.

Isabel Protomartir is a regular peruser of these groups and the proud mama to a flock of six hens. Unlike most backyard chicken owners, she kind of lucked her way into the lifestyle. Protomartir, who works in public relations and marketing, and her partner were looking for a new place with a bigger yard and space for their animals—and eventually some chickens. Talking a landlord into allowing you to own chickens is not easy, so when Protomartir stumbled on a listing for a rental property north of the Heights with a chicken coop already in the backyard, she knew she had struck gold.

The owners of the home assured Protomartir that the chickens would be removed from the property before she and her partner moved in. “We were, like, ‘No, this is what we’ve always wanted,’” Protomartir remembers telling them. The couple became the proud new owners of a free chicken coop and an already established flock of six egg-laying hens. From regularly cleaning out the coop to providing food and fresh water daily, raising chickens isn’t exactly low-effort or economical. However, the companionship and joy she gets from it is well worth the effort.

“It is absolutely not an easier or cheaper alternative to getting eggs from the store, there’s a lot that goes into it,” Protomartir says. “They have such huge personalities. This is going to make me sound crazy, but you can tell when they’re upset or happy with you. They’re just really fun. They’re super social animals and they want to hang out with you all day.”

While some people’s chicken care is pretty basic, Protomartir says hers are a bit more spoiled. They get lots of treats throughout the week, including plenty of frozen ones during the summer, and they even have a mister in their coop to keep them as cool as possible. The flock also has the seal of approval from Protomartir’s dog, Charlie, a 90-pound German shepherd mix who has become best friends with Birdie, a member of the flock. “They hang out and they share watermelon,” she says. “She’s just constantly by his side, it’s so cute. He’s a farm dog at heart.”

Unlike Protomartir, local bartender Gavin Gonzalez has been in the backyard chicken game since he was a child living in Oakland, California. He and his neighbors saw potential in an abandoned property filled with trash at the end of his block. They cleared it truckload by truckload, covered the land with a layer of good soil, and after testing it, began growing vegetables and raising chickens and ducks. “Anybody in our community could go there and garden and spend time with the animals,” Gonzalez remembers.

Gonzalez had a rebellious streak in his youth, and he was eventually sent away to live on farms. On one farm, as luck would have it, he was in charge of caring for the chickens. Although coerced chicken ownership can come with some downsides, Gonzalez puts all of his chicken-rearing tricks learned during that time to use with his own flock today. “I’m not an expert, I’m always learning,” he says. “But chickens have always brought me joy.”

Instead of throwing down a bunch of money for a prefabricated coop or paying someone to build one, Gonzalez built his in his Montrose backyard himself with the help of some friends. Using lumber taken from scrap piles at construction sites and from the trash in front of people’s houses, he ended up with a 10-foot-tall screened-in area with a door, a couple of places for his three hens to perch, and a nesting area.

Gonzalez lets them free range most of the day in his backyard, and although he’s more relaxed than many chicken parents, he makes sure they always have a steady diet of chicken feed and food scraps, as well as plenty of fresh water. A small bird bath and a box fan in his coop helps keep his hens from overheating in the summer. Gonzalez keeps a mirror above the water and fan to trick his chickens into gathering there; they’re attracted to their reflection, he says, and it forces them to stay under the fan. “Chickens aren’t necessarily very smart, you have to trick them into hydrating and staying cool,” he says.

While many approach the backyard chicken lifestyle casually, sometimes the obsession snowballs, and before you know it, you’re the owner of a backyard chicken company. That’s the case with Nicole and Mike “Chicken Mike” Graham, whose bespoke chicken coop building business, the Garden Hen, has built over 400 custom coops since 2014, from River Oaks and the Heights to Tanglewood, Memorial, and The Woodlands.

It all started with a hot pink coop that Nicole built all by herself 10 years ago at their then-house in Cypress. She had brought home five chickens against the wishes of Chicken Mike, who was then just in his Mike phase. Nicole slowly but surely won him over as the chickens wormed their way into his heart—and their eggs into his stomach. “She showed me how it was a pretty cool lifestyle and we started enjoying it together,” Chicken Mike says.

At the time, Nicole was working as an assistant teacher at a private school, where she oversaw its hatching program, an educational initiative where students watched eggs transition from the kind of thing you might want to have in an omelet to newly hatched chicks. Nicole would bring the chicks home every year after the program concluded, and the couple eventually ended up with 30 chickens in their tiny backyard. One day the duo set up a stand on the side of the road in an attempt to sell some of their brood, as well as some eggs and a coop Nicole had built. The chicken gods were on their side, and within six hours they had sold out of everything. Suddenly aware of the demand for all things chicken, the couple decided to parlay their one-day success into a business based around both education and coop building.

The couple also offers coop services for those who don’t want to do all the work themselves, including coop cleaning, wing clipping, basic predator removal, natural remedies, providing fertile eggs for broody hens, and even a health care plan that covers Nicole stopping by coops to provide treatments for a list of common ailments and illnesses. “If you’re uncomfortable with raising chickens or if you’re new to it and need some help, we are there to help you,” Chicken Mike says. The couple takes care of 17 chicken coops full-time now, including at two private schools and at a drug rehabilitation center where they also built a floating duck pen on a pond. 

While many people are ushered into the world of backyard chickens through social media—there are quite a few chicken influencers out there—Chicken Mike cautions prospective converts that there is a lot of maintenance involved and that it’s not for everyone. “You want everybody to be on the same page,” he says. “It’s a lifestyle and it’s an animal that you are going to have to care for. They’re similar to a dog or a cat: they provide something wonderful for a family. They provide eggs, and with kids there is a responsibility factor, but everybody in the family needs to be on the same page for it to work out.”

It’s been working out fine for both Protomartir and Gonzalez, despite them having somewhat different approaches—there’s no one size fits all when it comes to the backyard chicken lifestyle. For Gonzalez, the joys of the lifestyle are pretty simple. “They love you and depend on you, and they’re super cute,” he says. “And the benefits are that you get to hold chickens. You can just grab a chicken and play with it.”

Protomartir admits that her routine has changed a bit since acquiring her flock. She hosts dinner parties at her home, and now the highlight of every meal is when all of her guests go out back to meet her hens. “The chickens love to come and check everyone out,” she says. “It’s a new dynamic to our socializing that’s much different from what we’re used to do, and maybe that makes us 80 instead of 30, but we’re having a lot of fun.”