The Sterling Place Chicken Flock Of Crown Heights

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — Raising chickens in Brooklyn isn’t without its hazards.

Just ask Jeffrey Rentschler.

He and his 12 birds have been roosting alongside the Franklin Avenue Shuttle on Sterling Place in Crown Heights for almost 15 years, providing a bird break for parents with kids or people eating lunch or anyone with two quarters who wants to feed the birds dried grubs from a coin-operated vending machine.

Early on, a bird got loose and stumbled onto the tracks of the shuttle, separated only by a chain link fence.

“It was a clean decapitation,” said Rentschler. “That’s the only bird we’ve ever eaten.”

Rentschler, a sculpture artist who works as a studio hand with sculptor Carol Bove, typically keeps 12 birds at 626 Sterling Pl.

The flock is a mix of Black Australorps, Rhode Island Reds, Green Queens and Barred Rocks with names like Peep, Mama Odie, Baguette and Luna, the “head bird.”

The flock is a favorite of Sterling Place, and Rentschler could readily list the bird’s regular fans: the different parents and nannies with kids in strollers, the owners and their dogs who ravenously track the hens’ steps and his personal favorite — the folks who spend their lunch breaks with the birds.

One bird arrived a month ago, courtesy of the Department of Sanitation who found a discarded chicken in the trash.

“The supervisor who used to be on my route rang my bell and asked if it would be ok if I took her in,” Rentschler said.

It was mangy — an oversized bird clearly from a factory farm — but a month with the Rentschler flock had her looking full and vivacious.

“We call her Factory Farm Fanny.”

Many of their birds come this way.

Sometimes, Rentschler says, they’ll wake up to a bird they’ve never seen before.

Apparently people just throw unwanted birds over the fence.

“We’ve adopted a lot of birds,” he said, “people get into it, and then they don't realize how much work it is. And they don't have the situation I have.”

Someone once threw over a baby chick, quickly adopted by one of their hens, Frito Lay.

“She sat on him at night. They were inseparable. It was so cute,” Rentschler said. But the adopted chick turned out to be a rooster.

“He started cock-a-doodle-doo’ing and so we had to bring him to animal control,” said Rentschler’s partner, Jessica Ross, an acupuncturist.

Unlike hens, which are totally legitimate to have in New York City, roosters are illegal to keep within city limits.

Rentschler lives with Ross and their three teenaged children. The property slightly resembles a compound, harkening back to an organic, more do-it-yourself Brooklyn pushed out by market forces years ago.

From the street, there are signs pointing out the dried grub vending machines, with arrows pointing to the “worm hole,” where passersbys can help feed the hens.

During the egg laying season over the summer, when the flock can lay up to nine eggs a day (not all of the birds are active egg-layers), the kids help sell them to neighbors by writing their phone numbers in chalk on the sidewalk next to a egg-ticing message.

“They’ll run eggs out to people,” Ross said.

But during the winter, the hens hang up their hats and wait until the warmer months and longer days to start egg production again.

In the front sits the pasture, filled with Rentschler’s sculptures. The biggest one, which resembles a huge tricycle with a propeller, is from his art school days at UNC Chapel Hill.

“I call it the funky cackle,” he said.

Rentschler has worked for years as a studio assistant for renowned sculpture artist Carol Bove and also worked as a part-time art handler for JP Morgan Chase for years.

“We didn’t really fit in to the whole corporate thing,” he said of the job which included rotating art from the bank’s 30,000-piece art collection in and out of the corporate offices, “but we cleaned up.”

Further back in the lot sits a large chicken coop that Rentschler and Ross built, complete with an automatic door, which helps keep the birds secure.

Inside, the house is just as funky as the outside.

When Rentschler first moved to Crown Heights from his former Gowanus loft home, he said the Sterling Place house was operating as some sort of off-the-books SRO, with lockers and padlocks on cabinets. City records show that in 1998, the building was in danger of collapsing into the nearby Franklin Avenue shuttle tracks.

“It was a mess,” he said, “we had to do a full gut renovation.”

Which Rentschler did himself, along with his ex-wife and some friends.

A large garage houses tools, a wood stove and a long half-pipe skateboard ramp where the kids, and Rentschler, skate.

“I’m competitive in the over-50 bracket,” he joked.

Inside the kitchen and living room, the walls are covered in an eclectic mix of musical instruments, artwork, and books, many of which were part of his father’s collection, a foreign service diplomat during the Cold War.

If you have the space, Rentschler and Ross say, keeping chickens isn’t all that hard. All you have to do is provide a secured coop, food, water and be ready to deal with poop. And the flies.

“The poo is good for the garden,” said Ross, “but it also attracts flies, too.”

“They’re really very easy pets,” said Ross.

But the best part of the birds is the joy it brings their neighbors.

A recent comment on a viral TikTok post featuring the chickens made Rentschler laugh.

“It was like: ‘I feed those fat hens every day on my way to work,'” he recalled.

Ross said some of the folks who eat their lunch by the birds can spend a solid hour watching the chickens. One regular brought a friend with her one day as she fed the birds, instructing the newcomer to do the same.

“She feeds them and she says to her friend: 'You're right. That brought me a lot of joy.'”