Barbara Lawlor, Nederland.  Maude is still a splendid lady, a lovely arch to her neck, a black, sleek, silky coat of feathers, a righteous gleam in her copper/brown eyes and even, at the age of five years old, an-every-now-and-hen egg layer. Maude was Lara Mastro’s first chicken and the relationship was so pleasing to both, it led Lara to create The Ned Hen and gave Maude a luxury home overlooking Coal Creek Canyon.

Maude is the grande dame of Lara’s chicken yard, in which at least 70 baby chicks,  pullets, matronly layers and a few roosters, of many different breeds, spend their days in various indoor or outdoor structures, depending on their age.

In the last month, at least 500 baby chickens have been delivered to backyard chicken homes in our mountain area. They came through the mail, they were hatched locally and a majority of them was sold by the Nederland Feed and Pet. Chickens have claimed a place in our homes and lives and Lara loves sharing her birds and their stories with the community. Especially the local children, future fowl breeders.

Lara took took care of turkeys and goats at her childhood home in Wheatridge and became fascinated with  birds. Not so much with goats. She remembers playing the accordion while the turkeys would sit, gathered around her feet.

“Those turkeys were so huge, about 55 pounds, they wouldn’t fit in the oven and we had to cut them into thirds.”

After high school, Lara followed her instinct of nurturing animals and enrolled in Bel-ReaVet School in Denver. After graduating in 2008 she moved to Eldora and dropped off a job application at the Peak to Peak Veterinarian Clinic and was hired.

One day, she stopped in a Ace Hardware to buy a new battery and was assisted by Ace employee Dustin Mastro. Within the next year, the two married and had their first child, Jayden In 2010, the Mastros moved to their home off County road 99 and that’s when Lara met Maude. It was actually Dustin’s idea to raise chickens. She a mix of chicks from the Nederland Feed Store and enjoyed watching them grow, learning how to care for them.

When their second son was born, Lara chose to stop working outside the home and learned how to make soap and shampoo on Home Tending Facebook sites. “I liked the idea of growing my own food.”

Soon her first batch of chickens outgrew their coop and she began building more, most of a coop that she could walk into. After two years, she had a massive, totally chicken wired in outdoor pen, divided into sections to appropriately house the different aged flocks of hens. At this point she ordering the hatchlings from Meyers Hatchery catalog in Ohio.

The chicks arrive ready to eat and drink and poop and grow.

For about the first four weeks, the babies need to warmed by a heat lamp until they feather out enough to be put in an outdoor henhouse. This past weekend, Lara had baby chickens in her living room, her bathroom, her garage and in the barn. She had button quails setting on teeny eggs. A regular chicken will take up to 42 hours to complete the hatching process. A button quail pops out in about five minutes and is the size of a bumble bee.

“I spent time researching chicken genetics and the standards for the breed and for the past three years got into creating chickens that lay colorful eggs. I learned as I went, studied the standards of the American Poultry Association and decided to do my own breeding.”

The first home hatched egg was a Cuckoo Maran who turned out to be a rooster. She sold him. In 2013, Lara created Ned Hen. She was having so much fun she wanted to spread the word about the joy of raising chickens. She wanted to be the “chicken chick,” and influence the town and the mountain residents.

Her newest batch of babies are blue, black and silver Ameracaunas. Her goal is to improve the standard. She hatched a batch of eggs for the Wild Bear Mountain Ecology Center, giving the children a chance to be part of the whole coming out of their shell process.

Raising chickens has its risks. One batch of eggs didn’t make it when a fire in the wood stove dried up the humidity in the air of the room they were in. A lesson learned.

Sometimes the lessons are emotionally difficult. To keep the breeding standard, Lara says she will have to thin the roosters. “I had to talk myself into doing it. It was a little emotional, but that is part of the process. I will make broth with them. I am learning how to pick the good breeding birds, hardy, cold weather birds.”

Lara can tell whether a chick is a rooster or not by the time it is five weeks old by the ridges on its comb or the waddle coming in, its body language, whether it stands tall.

Last week, she sold her last incubator birds and will be selling more later in summer after getting the eggs she wants. She will save here top chickens to keep over the winter.

“The process is always evolving, there is no right or wrong, there is experimenting and learning.”