Farmer

Shelby Lincoln

When I was but a wee thing scuttling around the suburbs of Canton, my friends and I had the superb luck to capture an escaped budgie bird. My mother, about to learn a valuable lesson regarding why she should ask her children for context before agreeing to anything, told me that yes, I could keep a parrot if I caught one outside. Thus began my lifelong love of birds! This love was only further fueled by my grand discovery of farm birds and game fowl in college, where I attended my first game bird swap meet and learned that peafowl could be privately owned by pretty much anyone with a farm. After college I began work as an animal husbandry technician at the University of Michigan, and saved enough to settle into my hobby farm in Belleville, where I remain to this day. As soon as I'd closed on the property, I set about building pens and breeding cool chickens and spending 8 years learning two valuable lessons. The first keeping peafowl is the happiest I've ever been, and the second that I vastly prefer keeping quail to keeping chickens. These days, I work from home, writing stories, raising birds, and always looking to learn something new!

I believe knowledge should be openly and enthusiastically shared, and that teaching and learning should be an act of joy. I believe that there are many different avenues of learning - seeing, hearing, reading about, doing - and I want to try to bring all of them to the table to make learning as accessible as possible to as many as possible. I have a lot of completely unabashed excitement for my craft, I love answering questions, I love talking about my work, and I believe that making mistakes is one of the best tools we have for learning. This combination makes room for the excitement of others to grow with less worry about how they look or whether they might make mistakes along the way.