Chicken coops cropping up in Greenville backyards

Take a peek around your neighborhood and you may even find one yourself —– a chicken coop.

“It is going crazy,” said Jim Adkins, a sustainable poultry expert who recently visited Furman University for a sold-out workshop on backyard chicken keeping.

He said he's seen a huge surge in recent years in the number of people who keep chickens in urban and suburban environments. Some do it for food, some do it for fun, some do it for nostalgia. But whatever the reason, folks with chickens say it's not as strange —– or as tough —– as it may sound.

“It's no trouble,” insisted Deborah Gibson, who bought five chicks about a year ago from a local feed store.

The inspiration came from her sister, who has a flock of chickens at her rural home down state.

“She just has the best time with it,” Gibson said. “When my granddaughters got older, I thought, ‘How cute would that be if we had a coop that we could gather the eggs and have just a few little chickens?' ”

The girls, ages 4 and 2, live across the street from Gibson and are her regular helpers.

“They're back and forth. We're in that coop and we're cleaning, we're feeding. Their little friends come over, and we have little tea parties out by the coop,” she said. “It's so fun.”

She's down to one bird in her yard at the moment after an unexpected turn of events with the original flock of chicks: one began to crow.

“I heard this funny little noise coming from my coop one morning. I thought, ‘What is that?' ” she said with a laugh.

Over the next three weeks, three others started crowing. Not wanting to be the bane of her neighborhood with four crowing roosters, she gave the birds away to people with farms or larger properties.

But she's had such fun with her remaining hen, Cocoa, that she's ordered three more chicks from a hatchery (these are supposed to be all hens) and is expecting them at the end of the month.