Keep Chickens!: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs and Other Small Spaces (9 page)

One way to find out whether chickens are permitted is to call the animal control department or health department in your town. Tell the employee you’re put in touch with that you want to know if keeping chickens is legal where you live. If it is legal, ask if there are any specific restrictions or requirements related to chickens. Take notes. If the answer is not readily available, the city clerk may need time to obtain the correct response and will ask to call you back. Be patient!

Be sure to ask the employee to provide you with the code number and section numbers that pertain to keeping chickens in a residential neighborhood. After telephoning first, you can also visit the city department, city hall, or county clerk’s office to review the code yourself. Make copies of the pages of city code that pertain to keeping chickens.

If you have access to the Internet, the quickest and easiest way to review the local chicken codes is through on-line research. Most cities and towns have a web site with links to the municipal code. If you can’t find the codes at the city’s home page, you can access a database service, like American Legal Publishing at
www.amlegal.com
or Municipal Codes Corporation at
www.municode.com
. Both services provide the index and text of the municipal codes available for selected cities in most of the 50 states for free (and for even more cities for a fee). Once you are able to call up your city or town codes, keywords that generally bring up the relevant information are c
hickens, poultry,
or
livestock. Livestock,
in legalese, means typical domesticated farm animals, like cows, goats, sheep, and chickens.

Municipal codes in different cities are all organized basically in the same fashion. Major topics relating to city legislation (such as animal control and health and sanitation) are called “chapters” or “titles” in the city codes. The chapters provide general information about the topic. Specific requirements or prohibitions relating to the general topic are organized into “parts,” “sections,” and “subsections” in the codes.

Whether on-line or at the city or town hall, if you have trouble pinpointing the law on chickens, ask a clerk for assistance. Also ask for assistance if you find
no law
relating to chickens. You might have missed something, so you should double-check before investing in your urban coop. If there isn’t a law in the municipal code expressly prohibiting chickens, you can probably keep them. This is usually the case in towns and cities in the Midwest and South, where chickens aren’t as removed from daily household life as they are on the densely cosmopolitan East and West Coasts.

Poultry Tribune,
circa 1940.

Depending on where you live, your city code may allow residents to keep a certain number of hens (no roosters, remember?) without obtaining a permit. For instance, here in Portland, Oregon, our “chicken” code, found in City Code Section 13, subsection 13.050, states that no permit is required unless you want to keep a flock of more than three hens. You may be required to obtain an annual permit for your flock of three or fewer if the city has received nuisance or odor complaints from neighbors.

If you need a permit, obtain the form from the appropriate city department. You may have to pay a nominal one-time or annual fee to the county clerk’s office. In some areas, issuance of a permit is conditional upon the written consent from all neighbors whose property adjoins yours or who are within a certain prescribed distance from your residence or the coop itself. The logic of the law: If the immediate community agrees to a neighbor’s desire to keep several hens, it is less likely that complaints about the urban fowl will come up later.

Just because you have a permit to keep half a dozen hens doesn’t mean you will always have the permit. If there any complaints about your chickens’ behavior or if coop conditions necessitate a visit from a city inspector, you may be required to have annual inspections prior to obtaining each year’s current permit. Also, permits can be revoked if your chickens cause any kind of nuisance, like excessive clucking or a foul-smelling coop, that results in repeat visits from a city inspector or other representative.

City codes often grant the permit not only contingent upon the informed, written consent of neighbors, but also with certain setback restrictions on the location of the coop in proximity to adjoining neighbors’ property lines, doors, and windows. Some codes require that the coop be 20, 50, or 100 feet from the nearest neighbor’s windows or doors. Not only are these setback requirements the law, they are the right and polite thing to do (I’m a stickler for courtesy). Set your coop as far away from your house as you can. Be sure you also set it as far as possible from your neighbors’ homes. If you don’t want to smell chicken coop in your kitchen, neither will your neighbors.

New suburban bedroom communities (a.k.a. planned unit developments, or PUDs) almost always prohibit keeping chickens in the neighborhood. These rigidly ruled communities like to keep themselves looking clean and sanitary. For a nominal homeowner association fee, a management company flunky will police your neighborhood and issue you a citation if you have more than five weeds on your property at any time. Needless to say, the PUDs have rather restrictive covenants about what homeowners may do with their homes. Such communities barely allow residents to keep dogs, much less chickens. Nonetheless, I’m hopeful. I believe that as more people start to keep small flocks of chickens in their gardens, the regulations of these PUDs will someday change to be more amenable to chickens in city and suburban neighborhoods. We should all have a right to fowl company in our gardens!

Finally, while the coop you build may be small enough not to necessitate a building permit, you should check with the building department or planning department where you live to make sure. Unless you are building an A-frame cabin on your standard-size city lot, you probably will not need a building permit.

After determining that a small flock of chickens in your residential yard is legal, obtaining the necessary permits, and getting your neighbors’ consent, you can finally start to think about building your urban coop.

Building a coop can be great fun. In this sort of project, the planning and design stage is just as fun — and as important — as the hammering and sawing. You need to address several preliminary questions before you strike the first nail. What sort of protection do your chickens need from the weather? How big does the coop need to be? Do you want the coop to be a fancy fairy-castle affair or a plain and sturdy pen? What type and quantities of supplies will you need? Do you have a place for the coop in your yard where it will comply with any existing building setback requirements? Building a chicken coop and keeping a small flock of chickens in your garden will be easy once you have answers to these questions.

The term
coop
refers to the entire hen habitat, which includes a chicken run and a henhouse. The chicken run is the outdoor portion of the coop, enclosed by chicken wire. The floor of the run is usually dirt and should be covered with gravel or absorbent materials, such as straw and cedar shavings. It can be enclosed with a roof or left open to the elements. Obviously, the chicken run and the chickens in it will stay cleaner and cooler if the run is roofed.

What do chickens do in the run? They hang out. Think of the run as a poultry living room or a chicken bar and grill. They eat and drink in the run, walk around, dig in the dirt, cluck among themselves. When they wake up in the morning, chickens head right out the hole in the henhouse door to the run to do the same thing they did the day before. And they love it!

The henhouse is a fully enclosed wood structure inside or adjoining the chicken run. Your hens sleep in the henhouse at night and lay eggs in it during the day. A small doorway in the henhouse opens into the chicken run. The floor of the henhouse should be raised off the ground on cement blocks or a solid cement pad.

Inside the henhouse, on opposite walls, are one or more perches and nest boxes. The perch is where the hens sleep, or roost, at night. Nest boxes are small, private cubicles where hens lay their eggs. Both perches and nest boxes should be firmly secured to the henhouse walls and elevated some distance from the floor.

The coop is bounded by a sturdy wire fence. The henhouse, located within the coop, is where the chickens sleep and lay eggs.

How much space do chickens need? Per chicken, no less than 2 square feet (0.2 m2) in the henhouse and 4 square feet (0.4 m2) in the run. Halve those figures for bantams. A coop that is 10' x 4' x 5' (305 x 112 x 152 cm) with a henhouse that is 4' x 4' x 5' (122 x 122 x 152 cm) is a vast, comfortable estate for three chickens. In my neighborhood, I’ve seen smaller habitats that work, though they don’t allow any extra wing room for the chickens. If you plan to keep your chickens in a smaller coop, you’ll need to let them roam free in the garden a few times each week. They’ll be a lot happier and healthier if they can stretch their legs from time to time.

If you have the room, give the hens extra space in the coop. If you don’t give your chickens enough room, they will get anxious and start to stress out. Chicken anxiety creates coop chaos by manifesting in bad habits and compulsions, like pecking and biting one another, feather pulling, eating their own eggs, and cannibalism. For a happier place, give chickens their space! Then again, don’t be impetuously motivated and build a coop big enough for 50 hens. Keep the coop at a reasonable scale for your lot and neighborhood. After all, we’re talking about housing just a few chickens.

Another good idea is to make the coop and henhouse tall enough that you can walk in them. Crawling into your coop and henhouse to clean them is no picnic, no matter how much you like your chickens. Also, feeding, watering, and egg collection are easier to manage if you can walk inside the henhouse. You may want to install two doors into the henhouse — a chicken-sized door leading out into the run and a human-sized door at the back allowing you to enter the henhouse without having to walk through the run.

I recommend enclosing the coop completely, including a roof. By entirely enclosing the chicken coop, you protect your hens from predators like stray dogs, cats, raccoons, and occasional fly-by raptors. The roof can be made of netting, leaving the run open to the elements, or of a solid surface, such as plywood. A solid roof (made of plywood or tin, for example) will provide shade and keep rain off the chickens when they are out digging on a rainy, winter day.

If you’re keeping bantam hens, definitely enclose the chicken run with some kind of roof; bantams have no problem catapulting themselves over a 6-foot (1.8 m) fence. Heavy breed hens, like the Girls, get only a few feet of altitude when they try to fly (but they do get a standing ovation for trying).