The Reverend

Don't Hate The Rev. from Zazzle.com

T-shirt designed by a friend to support The Reverend, our slightly illegal backyard family member.

More information on The Reverend's Facebook page.

Friends of The Reverend

Full text of a letter delivered to our neighbors (along with a jar of strawberry jam):

July 14th, 2011

Hello Neighbors,

We wanted to extend an apology to anyone who survives the morning cacophony of crows, stellar jays, raccoons, car alarms, sirens and the occasional fire truck visit only to get the morning sermon from one of our chicken flock – The Reverend Green, or “The Reverend” as we call him.

Seriously, a sincere apology.

He is a most unexpected part of our family, but one that we have become quite attached to. We have been hoping he would stay quiet (and was until last Thursday), and so far we’ve only noticed a 15 or 20 minutes max sermon around 5:45 – 6:00 AM (we are usually up after the Crow Festival of 3:30 AM) but realize that can still be annoying, especially to those who aren’t feeling the LOVE of The Reverend and his Congregation first thing in the morning.

Since we spend about half of the year living on a street that feels like it is doing a reenactment of the Tet Offensive and American Civil War COMBINATION 24/7, we thought this would be a minor inconvenience at best. Who knew America got a six month birthday celebration, and just ending in time for the World of New Year’s Celebrations? Nothing says “Happy Birthday” like having our largest dog try to crawl under our legs and watching the windows wave back and forth all night long and looking at the clock to see it is 3:00 AM and we still haven’t slept and need to be up in two hours.

We wanted to let you know that we are attempting to put in some sound proofing and ways to delay the sermon until most folks are on their way to work. We’ve been doing research. If that still doesn’t work, and we are hopeful that it does, we are trying to come up with a back-up plan that we hope we don’t have to do. We have contacted folks that we know just in case. But we hope you notice a big difference after this weekend.

Our hens have not started laying eggs yet, but they should be doing that soon – within a month we expect. We will have more than we can eat and would love to share them with you. In addition we are over-run with strawberries, raspberries and soon blueberries that we would like (to bribe you with) share with you. We know we have a HUGE WOODEN FENCE and usually are overrun with mean looking teenagers (we are down to one plus a girlfriend and he is harmless), but we really aren’t nearly as stand-off-ish as we fear we might appear. We are nice guys. We have references and Moms. You can come and meet the girls; Nina, Nico, Aretha, Bobbie Gentry, Yva II, Etta, Yoko and Bessie. And you can have a word with The Rev too. We often invite folks from the trail (especially those with kids) to come on over to see the chickens and pick berries – feels odd we haven’t had many of those we share a street with do the same. Heck, if you catch us on the right day we might even have some homebrew (Rodney makes his own) to share.

PLEASE let us know if our efforts to be peaceful and good neighbors are not working. We really do love living in this amazing home with our creek and the forest and the coyotes and the kids and the library and the Taco Truck and the Pho and the birds. We feel so fortunate.

Thank you

(signed with our names, address, emails and phone numbers)