A Tour of Chicago’s Chicken Coops

I must admit that Chicago was the last place I expected to have a close encounter with livestock that weren’t part of a petting zoo. But with the growing popularity of urban agriculture, it’s beginning to feel like “Green Acres” around here.

Remember the runaway roosters spotted on Paulina this past summer? They have friends. Lots of them.

The second annual tour of Chicago’s backyard chicken coops, held in late September and sponsored by Windy City Chickens, featured 27 locations that stretched from Evanston to Hyde Park. And those were just the people willing to open up their homes to strangers.

On a relentlessly drizzly afternoon, I set out to visit the handful of coops within walking distance of Lincoln Square, pulling on a pair of rubber boots as a precautionary measure. (Do I have to spell it out for you? OK: p-o-o-p.) My first stop: Ainslie, where I was a bit freaked out to discover that the chickens were of the free range variety. As in, they had the run of the yard. Maybe I was Tippi Hedren in a past life, because I have an illogical fear of being pecked to death by birds.

“They’re not really aggressive,” coop keeper Tom Boeman assured me.

That was just one of the myths dispelled during the course of my adventure; education, it turned out, was the primary goal of the tour, according to Martha Boyd, program director of Angelic Organics Learning Center’s Urban Initiative in Chicago and moderator of the Chicago Chicken Enthusiasts website. (CCE is an excellent resource for anyone in a fowl frame of mind. Don’t have a yard? There are co-op options.)

The common misconception that backyard chickens are a messy, stinky, noisy nuisance nearly led to a ban on the birds four years ago by Chicago’s City Council, until Ald. Mary Ann Smith (48th Ward) stepped in and brokered a reprieve. The bad rap can be blamed more on those doing a poor job of tending to their flocks than the chickens themselves, Boyd noted. “We do what we can to help people understand it’s legal,” she said. “What we’ve been trying to do is say there are policies on the books to take care of any problems. That’s why I try to get aldermen and their staff out to see what it should be.”

If the tour is any indication, what those aldermen will likely discover: clean and well-maintained coops and healthy, beautiful birds being cared for like any household pet that happens to live outdoors. “The people who are doing this well are our ambassadors,” said Boyd.

“Doing well” typically means eliminating the major issue associated with urban chickens: Mr. Rooster, we’re talking about you and your cock-a-doodle-do. “Roosters are amazingly loud,” admitted Boyd. “In some neighborhoods, people grew up with the sound and like it, but it’s by far the biggest complaint.” While roosters are not prohibited in Chicago, excessive noise is and that includes crowing.  “I just recommend no rooster,” said Boyd.

The owners I visited, all of them relative newbies with less than five years total experience among them, had taken that advice to heart.

Boeman, who raised his chickens from eggs, wound up with five hens and a couple of roosters. “We recognized that could be an issue,” he said of the roosters, so he found them a home with a farmer he met at the Oak Park farmers market. (Yeah, and my mom just happened to run into a “farmer” when she took our cat, Cuddles, to the animal shelter. I made Boeman swear his story was legit.)

While hens are typically much quieter cluckers (and certainly no more annoying than a barking dog, said Boeman), owners have come across the occasional obnoxious exception, the same way that out of millions of Italian-Americans, you’re bound to find a Snooki. Brian Westphal and Mike McVickar welcomed four foster chickens to their home on Winona when a friend received 10 by mistake. “But I only see three,” I noted.

The fourth hen was Rhonda. “She was very sassy. Personally, for us, she was a little too noisy,” McVickar explained. So they shipped her off to Westphal’s sister and brother-in-law, who run a farm in Wisconsin (swear to God), where Rhonda reacted like Carrie Bradshaw shipped off to, well, a farm in Wisconsin. She took one look at her less manicured country bumpkin sisters and promptly tried to escape. “She was definitely a city chicken,” laughed McVickar.

Prima donnas like Rhonda aside, owners agreed that chickens are actually quite low maintenance beyond the initial learning curve and coop construction: Chickens don’t need to be walked, there’s no litter box to deal with and unlike other exotic pets, they don’t cause widespread panic when they run away from home.