BASTROP, Texas—Why did the chicken cross the road? Here in this old Texas frontier town, the answer to the riddle is clear: Because it has a legal right.
A flock of feral chickens has been protected by law in Bastrop since 2009, given free rein to roam on a stretch of a paved road named Farm Street.
On a recent afternoon, cars slowed as roosters and hens crowed and clucked and strutted across the street, which is lined with bright yellow signs declaring, “Slow: Farm Street Historic Chicken Sanctuary.”
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The flock is believed to date back to bygone farms in this town of 7,856 people some 30 miles southeast of Austin. The birds are beloved by the neighborhood, and when the city attempted to round them up, Farm Street residents pushed for sanctuary status.
Now, however, some in Bastrop are squawking. The birds are proliferating and migrating to other parts of town, where their all-night crowing and indiscriminate release of avian feculence isn’t considered charming.
Mayor Ken Kesselus has a message for the chickens who wander beyond the Farm Street sanctuary: You’re fair game.
A “bad rooster” responsible for flower-bed scratching and other offenses personally spurred the mayor to action last December.
“I organized a posse,” says Mr. Kesselus, a 68-year-old retired Episcopal preacher, “but we didn’t have any luck.”
The problem was that it was a “senior posse,” he says, and the bird easily flummoxed the older men for hours with his ability to scamper and fly. Undeterred, Mr. Kesselus returned the following day with some neighborhood teens and a fishing net. It took some effort, but they got their prey, he crows.
City council member Kay Garcia McAnally, author of the chicken ordinance, says the birds shouldn’t be blamed for straying from Farm Street.
“Unfortunately, they can’t read the signs,” she says.
Bastrop is just the latest American city to grapple with wild chickens, often domesticated animals that flew the coop for reasons lost to time.
Over the years, there has been similar clucking over feral flocks in such places as the Hawaiian island of Kauai, the California wine country city of Sonoma, and Florida’s Key West.
Signs along Farm Street in Bastrop, Texas, alert drivers that they are entering the ‘Historic Chicken Sanctuary.’ ENLARGE
Signs along Farm Street in Bastrop, Texas, alert drivers that they are entering the ‘Historic Chicken Sanctuary.’ Photo: Zusha Elinson/The Wall Street Journal
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In Key West, local leaders have tried with little success to get rid of some of the thousands of wild chickens said to be descended from fighting roosters once popular on the island. In 2004, officials hired a barber with a knack for chicken-wrangling to round up the birds, at a cost of $20 a head. But he quit well short of the 900-bird limit, amid outcry from the animals’ supporters.
Key West City Commissioner Tony “Fat” Yaniz says he later proposed a $2 bounty for each dead bird in an attempt to thin the flock that he asserts has grown unchecked because the birds “screw like rabbits” and have no predators.
“I was almost hung by the neck by the chicken lovers,” he recalls.
Mr. Yaniz is now facing re-election, and one of the birds’ chief defenders, Katha Sheehan, also known as “the Chicken Lady,” warns his anti-chicken positions could hurt him at the ballot box.
“Anybody who talks about bounties…this is very medieval,” she says.
To outsiders, Bastrop might not seem like a place that would favor government intervention in the affairs of farm animals, or in much else. The city recently gained notice as the spot where people turned out to a meeting to protest Jade Helm 15, a military training exercise that some worried was a secret federal invasion of Texas.
On Farm Street, people feed and provide water for the Bastrop chickens, but the birds pretty much survive on their own, eating bugs and roosting in the trees. Eggs are found in culverts and garages.
Residents have bestowed names on their favorite birds such as a rooster they called Mr. McGillicuddy. Mr. McGillicuddy met an untimely end: he was run over by a speeding car.
That was before the ordinance and a subsequent resolution were passed. Although penalties for harming the chickens in the Farm Street sanctuary are contained in a nonbinding resolution, according to the city manager, Farm Street residents say that passersby respect the protected birds—most of the time.
On one occasion, there was a chicken-napping at the Farm Street sanctuary, according to Jane Campos, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1960. “One lady was driving down the street and jumped out the car and grabbed a chicken,” she says. “I guess she got it for lunch.”
While that particular bird was a plump newcomer to the flock, Ms. Campos doesn’t think anyone would want to eat one of the tough wild chickens: “It’s like eating a football.”
Elsewhere in town, the animal control officer has been busy. A total of 23 wayward chickens were rounded up earlier this year, according to Detective Vicky Steffanic of the Bastrop Police Department, who says that the “trapping of chickens is on a complaint basis.”
Mr. Kesselus, the mayor, sought to explain his own chicken capture in December to locals who might think him too hawkish.
“I know folks who would have happily put the rooster on trial or eaten him for dinner, for revenge if nothing else,” the mayor wrote in the local newspaper. “Nevertheless, I pardoned him to freedom in a remote area.”
Mr. Kesselus has been “getting his neck pecked” over the chickens wandering into other parts of Bastrop, says David Marsh, general manager of a local bus system, who sat on a porch along Farm Street on a recent evening with friend Ian Molony, drinking cans of Tecate beer and looking out on the chickens.
But the birds, he argues, provide a valuable public service.
“There is no other more effective method of traffic calming,” he says. “I don’t know why the American Planning Association has never taken a look at it.”
Most cars respectfully came to a stop or slowed enough for the chickens to scamper. But one pickup truck full of teenagers—a species listed by Messrs. Marsh and Molony as a natural predator of Bastrop chickens— laid on the horn.
“Don’t you grab those chickens!” Mr. Marsh hollered.
The chickens were unimpressed by the blaring noise. They stood in the middle of the street before strutting defiantly to the side of the road.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-this-texas-town-chickens-ruffle-feathers-1444094745
