Backyard chickens fit in with Sarasota

 Sarasota, Florida's newspaper follows up on backyard chickens, three years after a controversial ordinance made them legal:

SARASOTA - Three years after legalization, the worst fears about urban chickens appear not to have materialized.

The biggest remaining challenge the city faces in keeping the birds is that many residents here can't tell a rooster from a hen.

So says a report from CLUCK, a local group that succeeded in 2011 in getting an ordinance passed allowing city residents to keep chickens on their property. The report to the City Commission was a test of the policy required at the end of a three-year probationary period.

With no one at City Hall opposing the once-controversial idea, and with commissioners visibly amused by CLUCK's chicken facts, that test was passed. The chickens have not created the kind of stink feared by many three years ago.

Gretchen Schneider, general manager of planning and development for Sarasota, said the city has received 21 complaints about chickens since 2011. They mainly involved loose hens or roosters kept in violation of the ordinance.

That's often an accident, said Jono Miller, a founder of CLUCK, or Citizens Lobbying for Urban Chicken Keeping. People buy the birds as baby chicks, when it is virtually impossible to distinguish their gender. Then the male birds grow up without anyone asking questions.

Overall, Schneider said, the impact of the chickens was “not bad,” considering her department hears nearly 2,000 complaints on other topics each year. “It's been pretty successful,” Schneider said.

If chickens can breathe sighs of relief, the news might have prompted one from Betsy, Pippy, Rose and Roz, four hens living the good life in Fran Tiner's backyard on Floyd Street.

There, the birds enjoy all the amenities they could hope for in Sarasota: a sunny, secure yard with fountains, a koi pond and a nesting box for laying eggs. At night, the hens march into their coop without being told, shunning the dark. In the morning, they let themselves out by stepping on a switch controlling an automatic door powered by a small motor Tiner salvaged from an ice maker.

Tiner, 67, invented the contraption so that he wouldn't have to get up at the crack of dawn and let them out himself. “Nobody's got to tell them anything,” he said.

Making house calls

The chickens are smarter than people think, and mostly handle their own affairs, Tiner said. They even have a live-and-let-live arrangement with Ajax, the family's muscular pit bull. “They do have a pecking order.”

Chickens can live for 15 or 20 years, and lay eggs for about seven of those. They can produce 250 or 300 eggs a year.

Tiner is one of the members of CLUCK who convinced the city to allow this. The 2011 ordinance permits up to four hens on a single-family property, as long as they are housed in a coop that can be moved from one place to another to mollify neighbors annoyed by clucking sounds.

Killing the chickens or selling their eggs is not allowed, and roosters are forbidden because, of course, they crow and can lead to the proliferation of chickens. 

Similar regulations have been taken up by Manatee County, Jacksonville, and other cities. Next, CLUCK hopes to convince Sarasota County to do the same. Chickens are not allowed in suburban areas of the county.

CLUCK has collected about 250 signatures on a petition asking the County Commission to consider chickens, but so far the commissioners have been reluctant.

That should be no surprise. When the city discussed the ordinance in 2011, some residents were so concerned about the birds' odors that they planned to bring a box of chicken droppings to City Hall to illustrate their point. Though dissuaded from that by the city manager, they did voice their opposition.

Since then, to keep even the occasional complaints from burdening city officials, members of CLUCK have been paying house calls on chicken owners who run afoul of the ordinance. Usually, said Miller, of CLUCK, the complaint stems from a chicken that has gotten loose in a neighborhood. Miller often catches and returns it himself, but sometimes he must break bad news to an owner: they are an accidental outlaw.

In one typical case, he asked the owner if they realized they were keeping a rooster.

No, I'm not, the owner said. She's a hen.

Miller pointed to the bird's green tail feathers, the large comb on its head, and its spurs — all proof of a male bird — and asked if it had laid many eggs.

No, the owner told him. They had been wondering about that.

“I told them, 'I don't think this is going to work out for you,' ” Miller said.