Raising Chickens in the City
(Page 3 of 4)
May/June 2006
By Linda Baker
“It’s kitty TV,” Carlson laughs, noting that the family cat spends hours watching the hens peck in the tractor. Zelda, Gertrude and Beatrice are unruffled by the feline attention, she says. “That’s what I love about this breed; they’re so mellow.”
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Urban chickens
Ordinances governing city chickens vary from city to city. Bill Finch, a Mobile, Alabama, newspaper editor who has written several articles on the subject, says laws prohibiting backyard hens often can be traced to the suburban development boom in the 1950s and 1960s. “As bedroom communities incorporated, they overturned codes allowing animals so they wouldn’t appear to be podunk towns,” he says. “But in older cities and towns, the codes were never updated.”
Mobile, for example, allows a liberal 25 chickens per household. Finch himself keeps seven backyard Ancona hens—a good breed for hot weather—that make the rounds of his oversize vegetable garden in a chicken tractor. “It’s the only nitrogen fertilizer I need,” he says.
As the “buy local” food movement gathers steam nationwide, activists are working to loosen more restrictive chicken codes. In Madison, Karstens says interest in backyard birds was so high that a fairly active “chicken underground” was developing until last year, when she and several others persuaded local officials to pass an ordinance permitting backyard coops and a maximum of four hens. The group prevailed with support from affiliates of the University of Wisconsin Poultry Science Department, who helped convince city officials that reasonable regulations could deter potential problems. “With a flock of 40 chickens, manure is a concern,” Karstens says. “With four, it isn’t.”
In Providence, Rhode Island, the Southside Community Land Trust raises urban chickens to educate the public about safe treatment and how to use chicken manure as compost. The organization also is working to combat the myth that you need roosters, the chicken world’s noisemakers, for egg production. You don’t. Although females need to mate with a male to produce a fertile egg, hens lay edible eggs as part of their ovulation cycle.
Every once in a while a male can sneak into a backyard, unannounced. A few weeks after Cranston, Rhode Island, resident Joanne Rich got her first hen—a Polish Golden Lace she dubbed Mrs. T because of a crown resembling a mohawk—she awoke to an unexpected surprise: a 5 a.m. wake-up call in the form of rooster crows emanating from the coop she had fashioned from her daughter’s swing set.