Hens hanging around in the backyard

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.”

KUSA*TV