Daylight Savings Time has ended and now it’s dark at 5 PM in Seattle. I’ve been threatening for years to start a movement to end Daylight Savings Time. The abrupt shift of hours, which doesn’t actually shift time, but just shifts what we call it, is not only arbitrary but actually disruptive. But it doesn’t fool the chickens.

My friend, Lyanda Haupt, author of Crow Planet, a book about that most urban of birds, wrote a blog post about how her chickens are not fooled by the shift out of Daylight Savings Time. They are going to sleep earlier and earlier, triggered by the cold and the dark. (She also wrote a lovely review of my book, Slow Time, but that’s not why I’m sending you there; I just thought the chickens had the right idea and I want to champion the idea of Chicken Time, a new kind of Slow Time.)

Lyanda’s chickens, tucked in for the night

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 2:59 am and is filed under Urbanism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.