Don’t buy the hype on Mean Bird

Her real name is June.

Mean Bird is one in a long line of pet hens that Zac and Heather Lytle named after female singers. In Mean Bird’s case, June Carter Cash. But she picked up her nickname after developing a habit of pecking at two speckled hens in the flock.

The Lytles are headed to Lilongwe, Malawi this coming fall for a two-year fellowship in global women’s health; Heather is an obstetrician/gynecologist who trained at Parkland. So in preparation for the move, they found a new home for seven of their 11 birds.

Their Kings Highway neighbor and friend, Amanda Pounds, agreed to adopt them. And she takes her new poultry pets very seriously.

When the Lytles first moved into their house on Montclair in 2008, Zac threw together a chicken coop using scrap wood and an old door he pulled out of bulk trash.

When graphic designer Pounds took on the hens, she went over and measured their previous coop and built a brand-new one of similar dimensions. She wanted them to feel at home.

She says it tickles her that the hens “put themselves to bed” around dusk every day, like a bunch of old ladies. And since she’s had them, she rises extra early to open the door to their coop so they can start their day of scratching, laying and doing chicken things.

Pounds reports that Mean Bird, now separated from those two hens she bullied, is not even mean anymore. But the nickname prevails.

Mean Bird lays pretty speckled eggs, and Pounds says fresh eggs are a perk of raising hens. But that’s not why she’s doing it. She finds it meditative to sit and watch the little cluckers.

“I like watching them being busy doing nothing,” she says.

How to make a chicken sit

Photo editor Danny Fulgencio really opened up a can of worms for his photo shoot with Mean Bird. This isn’t Fulgencio’s first rodeo shooting portraits for our annual pets issue. So he knows only the finest mealworms will do when asking a hen to smile for (or in Mean Bird’s case, glare at) the camera.