Urban Bird Muncie at the Living Lightly Fair

That's Chomperee the wannabe backyard chicken at the Living Lightly Fair, September 2010. So how does someone take a picture of a hen that somehow makes her look noble?

It was excellent to see such a show of support for backyard chickens in our community. Special thanks to the organizers of the Living Lightly Fair for letting us take part!

Thank you if you signed our petition (which will be making its way to our city legislators soon) or if you just stopped and talked.

(photo by Chris Bergin, The Star Press)

The Salmonella Outbreak!

Surely many of you have been following all the gory details about the DeCoster egg recall. This has definitely meant a boost to local egg economies nationwide (and perhaps to better regulations as outlined in the latest food safety bill in the Senate).

And, yes, let's just add "factory egg salmonella outbreak" to the list of reasons why striking down the ban on backyard chickens in Muncie will benefit our food safety and our health along with the environment and economy.

Pecks in the City: Some residents want to make Muncie fowl-friendly

(The Star Press archives and charges for their stories a week after they are published. Below is just the text of the article from July 3, 2010. Here is a link to a [poorly] scanned copy of the print version.)

by Michelle Kinsey

MUNCIE -- Chomperee was living the good life.

She would hop up on the picnic table every morning and watch her owners inside stumbling around for that first cup of coffee. She would spend her days roaming the back yard, munching on grass or, if her owners weren't watching, fresh herbs from the garden. She paid no mind to the neighbor's dog that watched, with great tail-wagging enthusiasm, her every move.

At night, she would hunker down on a bed of straw in her red doghouse. In the morning, if the mood struck her, she would lay an egg.

That's right, an egg.

Chomperee, you see, was a chicken. A city chicken, to be exact.

And, as her owners discovered, she was also illegal.

"We just assumed that when we moved here, you could have chickens," Lindsey Helms said as she sat with her husband Bryan Preston at the picnic table outside their near-downtown home.

They were wrong.

One afternoon in April, the animal control "Garfield" truck pulled up in front of the modest, single-story house. "They were tipped off that we had birds in the back yard," Helms said. "They said we had a week to get them out."

A city ordinance strictly prohibits the "harboring of poultry" within city limits.

Now the earthy, easy-going couple has become what they called "reluctant chicken activists" and the humans behind Urban Bird, a local group "dedicated to bringing chickens back to Muncie." Their Urban Bird Facebook page has more than 100 Muncie friends of the feathers so far and their popular blog clucks regularly about the city chicken trend.

Yes, trend.

It seems the hankering to have a few hens hunting and pecking in your yard is catching on nationwide.

More than 140 cities have already passed ordinances to allow chickens in urban areas, including Evansville and Bloomington. Big cities are welcoming them as well -- Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Toledo, even New York City. And Indy? Turns out there is not a specific ordinance forbidding fowl in back yards there.

Bloomington passed its ordinance in 2006 and what followed was anything but a "chicken boom," Preston, a lanky, soft-spoken guy, said with a quick smile. "There are only about seven people who have applied for permits since then."

But would a fowl-friendly new ordinance fly in Muncie?

"There are certainly more people interested in green living and local eating," Helms, 29, suggested. "And you can't get more local than your own back yard."

Preston agreed, his eyes wandering over to the rows of potatoes and sunflowers down one side of their yard. "It was nice to be able to go to the back yard and gather everything you needed for an entire meal -- herbs, eggs, some veggies," he said. "Simple and satisfying."

Helms, a Muncie native, and Preston, who grew up in Normal, Ill., met years ago in Chicago, where many of their city-dwelling friends kept chickens.

When they moved back to Muncie and into a home near Maring-Hunt Library, poultry seemed like a perfect addition to their sustainable lifestyle. They were already coordinating the community garden down the street, riding their bikes as much as possible, and reducing, reusing and recycling like nobody's business.

So last year, they spruced up a dog house they found on the side of the road, propped it up on wooden stilts near the garage, and fashioned a ramp leading up to its front door.

The first chicken to move in was Chomperee. Three more would follow -- Red Bird, Black Bird and Feather Face.

All of them are now with "foster parents" in Middletown.

But they weren't the only chickens cooped in the city. "There are quite a few people, right now, who have chickens in their back yards and you would never know it," Preston, 31, said.

Randall Jackson said he's pretty sure his neighbors in the Old West End aren't harboring hens -- and he likes it that way. "It's weird," he said. "I can't imagine living next door to a bunch of chickens. I live in the city for a reason. I don't like the country. Chickens are smelly and noisy and belong in the country. Simple as that."

But is it?

Helms and Preston, both grad students at Ball State University, have put together a booklet attempting to debunk some of the urban chicken myths.

Take the squawk factor, for example.

Roosters are noisy, Helms would tell you. Hens are not. And luckily, she points out, roosters are not necessary for a hen to produce eggs.

A sparrow landed on a branch of the maple tree towering above her and started to chirp. "That's noisier," she said.

As for the coop poop, Helms and Preston put it to good use. "We added it to the compost bin and used it to fertilize the gardens," Helms said.

In the booklet, they tout the other benefits of keeping chickens: as an affordable way to maintain a stable source of healthy food; as a great way for kids to learn where their food comes from; as quieter, cleaner and less potentially dangerous than other pets such as dogs and cats, and as a productive way to put ample unused urban space to use.

The booklet even offers up a revised ordinance that limits the number of chickens (8), keeps roosters out of the picture and makes sure coops are kept up to what you might call an odor-free code.

Preston said he's shared the info with some of the city council members, who now refer to him as "The Chicken Guy."

"Some of them were not completely against it and said they wanted to know more about it," he said. "That was encouraging."

But no one has stepped forward yet to take the ordinance under their wing.

Council member Linda Gregory said there are bigger issues right now.

"I feel like we have enough animal-control issues on our plate without adding chickens into the mix," she said. She went on to say that she would "certainly not sponsor an ordinance" and would "probably not vote in favor of one."

"I don't want them living next door to me," she said, adding that she would be concerned about "noise and odor," as well as "disease issues."

"I guess I feel like if you want to have chickens, you need to be away from other people."

Council member Sam Marshall said letting chickens in the city would open a "Pandora's Box" of livestock. "Where do we go from there?" he said. "Next we'd have people wanting horses and cattle in their back yards. I just don't see [the ordinance] as a thing that would be good for the city."

On the other side of the issue and the privacy fence from Preston and Helms, Emilie Carpenter was watching her kids -- Josephina and Julian -- play on the swing set.

"We really liked having the chickens next door," she said. "We could see them from our kitchen window; the kids would watch them while they ate breakfast in the morning."

They would even chicken-sit when their neighbors would go out of town.

"It's a silly law," Carpenter said as she tried to calm Wendy, the family's rambunctious black mutt. "Trust me, my dog is far louder than those chickens ever were. And she makes much bigger messes in the yard, too."

She laughed as the dog darted across the yard.

Josephina, 5, misses Red Bird the most. "I liked to go over and get eggs," she said. Eggs that she preferred scrambled. "I'm sad we don't get anymore of her eggs."

"I look forward to the day when the ordinance is revised and we get the chickens back in the neighborhood," her mom added as the kids headed for the slide.

The red doghouse coop hasn't been touched since the city chickens went away.

"It seems so defeatist to take it down," Helms said, glancing over at it. The door was open. Inside, straw was still strewn across the floor.

As if on cue, Wendy jumped up to her spot along the fence line and rested her head on the top.

"I think she still looks for them," Helms said.

Contact Michelle Kinsey at 213-5822.