Sanford’s chickens
SANFORD - The 14 chickens in Alexandra Reid’s backyard are an orderly flock, content to spend their days quietly scratching in their fenced coop and their evenings roosting in their tidy house.
Not so their owner, who has been running about like one of her charges with its head cut off since an inspector said her birds violated a city ordinance and would have to go.
The ban is all the more frustrating, Reid says, because it appears to be based on a fear that allowing a few chickens would open the town gates and allow Sanford’s growing Hispanic population to bring in all manner of livestock.
“It really isn’t just about chickens anymore,” Reid said this week as she and her daughter, Jordan, worked on egg-shaped picket signs for a demonstration before a City Council meeting.
Indeed, Bob Davis, who has long tended chickens at his home in Raleigh’s Five Points, has taught classes in the hobby and helps organize the annual Hen-side the Beltline Tour d’Coop, said he has received nearly a dozen calls from people this year asking for advice on how to get their local governments to relax their chicken bans. At least one, he said, was from a community where some feared that Hispanics would exploit an opening.
Until this year, he said, most people who sought his expertise wanted to know how to build a coop, how many chickens to start with and what types, and how to care for them.
“This year,” he said, “it’s, ‘How do I change my community, or my homeowners association or whatever, to get them to allow chickens?’ ”
Reid has gone before the Sanford City Council twice, and both times the board has refused to take action. She was accompanied at this week’s meeting by an 80-year-old neighbor who has kept chickens for 20 years and told the council that it represents the rights for which he fought in World War II.
Council members have not forgotten that a few years ago, the board was compelled to pass an ordinance banning the slaughter of goats and other livestock inside city limits. Some residents, primarily Hispanic, had alarmed their neighbors by buying and killing the animals to prepare for special meals. Town boards in Monroe and Siler City passed similar rules.
Councilman Linwood Mann said he has heard from many constituents who don’t want chickens as neighbors. They worry, he said, that newcomers from rural areas of Latin America will bring in their own favorite farm animals.
“This is just one of many ordinances put on the book to help people trying to live in harmony,” Mann said. “So far, it has worked very well.”
Tony Asion, executive director of El Pueblo, a Latino advocacy group in Raleigh, was mystified.
“What in the world would make them think that all Latinos want to have chickens in their backyard?” Asion asked. “Here’s the deal: It has nothing to do with culture. It has to do with where you came from. If you came from a rural area where you had animals in your back yard, that’s what you’re used to. The same is true in the United States. Maybe in rural Alabama they might have them, but not in Montgomery. I don’t think this has anything to do with ethnicity.”
Improving the coop
Reid says she wasn’t even aware of Sanford’s chicken stricture until she had broken it. Her family’s affair with the birds began at least three years ago, when a friend gave her children some chicks. The circa-1900 house where the family lives on Lee Avenue, a couple of miles from the heart of downtown, had coops when they bought it 10 years ago, and some neighbors had chickens, too.
The Reids built a hen house and a new coop, siting it farther back from the house on the one-acre lot. It’s fenced on the sides and top, to keep the chickens in and hawks and roaming dogs out…
{Note: You’d have to know Cary to get the “beige” joke.}
Robert Karaffa:
Oh, I love this. Just went round and round about solar panels on my house in the architectural review district of my town. Long story. Got a building permit but didn’t think we needed a zoning review for clip-on panels. Oh My!! Some people thought that they didn’t like the way the panels looked. On a house that was radically modified in the middle of the last century, doesn’t look one whit like it originally did. Didn’t fit in with the “19th. Century Character of the District.”(My house was built in the 20th. and there is construction from three different centuries in the neighborhood.) Did it Feral Scholar style and made it a huge educational opp. with lots and lots of local press coverage, and we will get ordinances (which make no sense in my neighborhood) changed. Huge public support and having a Solar Tour of Ohio Planning Meeting at my house next Wednesday. Yeah, we got birds. Feed the neighbors. They love the eggs and the birds. Besides, to quote a not too clear ordinance birds “enhance the historical character of the district” everybody in this town used to have birds….and horse barns….and whiskey stills (which fueled the economy hugely, I want one.) So, aside from all the ethnic and other issues here in this article, I can’t wait for somebody to challenge me on the historical appropriateness of birds in my hood. Yes, good point: No Roosters, hear enough of them in Haiti. Most of the resistance to anything we have done is from people on a local blog that don’t have the common decency to put their names on their posts. So thank you for this post. The Karaffa Whiskey is in the works. And you can put my name on that!! And I will!! PS. De..no new Wyandottes yet, just Rhode Island Reds and Americauna, only because of local availability. I agree with you, everybody loves Wyandottes. I will get more. What a hardy breed!!
24 July 2008, 11:02 pmJen:
I gew up in Sanford and most people are racist towards the Hispanic population. People always made jokes that they smelled bad since the trailer park many lived in had a smell coming from it. Turned out it was a sewer pipe that wasn’t properly installed that the smell came from, not the trailer park. It was easier for some to belive they were dirty people instead of the town being inept.
That town needs lots of help politically, the council is full of good ole boy racists. I persoanlly knew one who was a preacher and a “democrat” who threw around the n-word like candy inside his home.
25 July 2008, 1:09 pmaudrey:
We have a city ordnance against chickens here as well - we need a minimum of 6 acres to keep even one chicken. Admittedly, I haven’t spent a lot of time around chickens, but I’m having a hard time understanding why we can cram 4 or 5 people into a 300 sq. foot FEMA trailer but a 5 pound chicken needs 6 acres.
25 July 2008, 9:31 pmMs Kitty:
As the wheels continue to come off the economic bus, even gated communitites are going to consider egg-laying hens as pets and the flowering tomatoes and broccoli as ornamental.
For the delusional the time-being, perhaps a compromise where a few hens, not crowing roosters, are allowed in city limits with a promise not to slaughter. Take pictures of the (white)children holding each named hen. Definitely take pictures of crying children as their beloved “Henny Penney” is ripped from their arms by animal control.
28 July 2008, 2:26 pmCharles:
Regional differences detected in birdsongs
Learning likened to human method
BY ZOE ELIZABETH BUCK • MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS • July 31, 2008
RALEIGH, N.C. — Humans aren’t the only creatures whose regional drawls and twangs give them away. The same thing goes for the songbirds, according to a study at Duke University.
“If you drive around the U.S., you’ll hear the same species of songbirds,” said neurobiologist Richard Mooney, who has developed a unique way to study how birds learn and published his results this year in the journal Nature.
“But if you listen closely, the songs sung by a swamp sparrow from a population in New York sound different from a swamp sparrow in Pennsylvania. … It could be likened to a dialect, or an accent.”
These dialects stem from the way that birds learn to sing — a process that is much like the way humans learn to talk.
For most animals, including nonhuman primates, communicative sounds develop naturally, without the need for tutors. Only select bird species, humans and perhaps some whales incorporate both nature and nurture into vocalizations.
The similarities between the learning processes are clear even on a microscopic level.
“Though there’s a large evolutionary distance between birds and humans, many of the brain mechanisms in the learning process turn out to be remarkably similar,” Mooney said.
These brain mechanisms include a phenomenon known as mirror neurons, which Mooney and his team documented in birds for the first time. Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that fires either because the animal is performing a certain action, or because it is seeing another animal perform that same action.
Using tiny devices mounted on the sparrows’ heads, Mooney and his team at Duke were able to describe mirror neurons that fired in the birds’ brains when they sang their own song or when they heard another bird sing a very similar song. The findings are the first descriptions of mirror neurons in a species other than primates and the first to associate them with vocalizations rather than movement.
31 July 2008, 9:09 am