Life is sunnyside up for Indianapolis chicken owners

Indianapolis may be behind other cities in new trends, but sometimes we catch up.

Food trucks, bike paths -- they took a while, but . . . check.

Now Indy's neighborhoods are becoming hamlets for urban chickens, flocks of a half-dozen or so birds that hunt and peck within the city limits, in areas with sidewalks and stoplights.

It's like "Green Acres" -- only inverted.

One would be hard-pressed to find a greener hobby: The backyard chicken is the pet equivalent of the Toyota Prius.

The chickens sleep on "roosts" in "coops" built in backyards, next to driveways; they give up uneven, all-natural eggs to their sustainability-happy owners.

It's impossible to say how many such folk there are here, but their numbers clearly are growing. On Sunday, Indianapolis will host its first organized tour of backyard chicken coops, a sort of benchmark. More than 100 people have signed up.

Backyard chickens -- mail-order chicks can be obtained in small quantities for the price of a decent hamburger -- are free to walk around and take dust baths at will, as opposed to enduring the caged-up squalor of industrial chicken farms. Their manure makes for great composting; and their eggs couldn't possibly be any more local -- zero fossil fuel is required to transport them from backyard through kitchen door.

Besides, "chickens are fun," says Maggie Goeglein, who has an NPR sticker on the rear window of her subcompact Honda and is working on a degree in Earth literacy from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. "They're not the brightest animals, but they have personality."

Goeglein has four, and as she enters her backyard in the Rocky Ripple neighborhood, they rush her. She smiles. She gives the chickens a fresh tomato and greets them by name.

"If I had a meat flock, I wouldn't name them," she says.

Betty, Roxanne, Ramona and Fern, like most backyard chickens, are being kept for their eggs, which, unlike the uniform supermarket eggs, come in various sizes and shades. Hens lay about one a day. Goeglein and her fiance, Jason Hanna, either eat the eggs or give them away to impressed friends and neighbors.

"The yokes are orange, not yellow," Goeglein notes, "and the egg white has more consistency. They just taste really eggy."

Backyard chickens go back to the Great Depression but petered out with prosperity. The current trend surfaced, as part of the global sustainability movement, five or six years ago, said Paul Shapiro of the Humane Society of the United States.

Today there are backyard chickens even in New York. (Had urban chickens been in vogue in the 1960s, is it possible Oliver Wendell Douglas would have elected not to drag that dingbat wife of his out to the country? Discuss.)

World chaos may have something to do with the backyard chicken escalation. "Whenever the economy is bad, people look more to self-reliance," says Elaine Belanger, editor of Backyard Poultry Magazine. (When Belanger's father-in-law discontinued the bi-monthly journal, in 1982, it had 4,000 subscribers; Belanger re-launched it in 2006, and today its circulation is 85,000).

Madison, Wis., was an early hotbed. Madison, the college town's college town, may have hosted the first Chicken Coop Tour, which is like a garden tour except for chicken coops. That was in 2005.

A coop tour is a sign a city has arrived, backyard chicken-wise. Seattle has one, as does Bend, Ore., and Portland.

But so do Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh and many other not-that-cool cities.