Road-crossing chickens create city-country flap

<p>Out on Fulton Road in northwest Santa Rosa, residents who bought new homes about a year ago live just across a fence from the ungentrified ranch house that Margaret and Dan Yolo moved into as newlyweds in April 1954.</p><p>One thing the old-timers to the south of the fence have in common with the newcomers to the north is chickens.</p><p>There's a slew of them, roosters and hens alike. Nobody's quite sure how many there are because most run and fly loose and they won't set long enough to be counted.</p><p>The chickens belong to the Yolos, but they sometimes peck and scratch, or worse, in the neighbors' fresh landscaping. It's beyond dispute that the people living in the homes nearest the Yolos' rustic acre have no trouble hearing the roosters that constantly, from first light to last, find something to squawk about. And the term squawk may be more appropriate than crow because the critics say it's unpleasant and constant.</p><p>Complaints have hatched, and last week Margaret Yolo answered a summons to appear in court. She was fined $200 for creating an animal-borne nuisance and was ordered to get the free-range birds into a pen and keep them there.</p><p>Margaret, who is almost 77, is embarrassed to be in trouble with the law for the first time in her life. She said she will work to meet the court order, but it won't be easy.</p><p>"You know anything about chickens?" she asked. "They're hard to catch."</p><p>At one level, the conflict seems to represent suburbia encroaching on a rural area and heartlessly squeezing out an agricultural way of life.</p><p>But at a personal level, officials with both City Hall and Sonoma County Animal Care &amp; Control say the trouble is not that the Yolos possess chickens, but that they have ignored the law.</p><p>"Yes, they (the Yolos) have been there a long time," said Mike Reynolds, the city's chief code enforcement officer. "Yes, they're entitled to have chickens on the property."</p><p>The couple would not have landed in court, he said, if they had acted months ago on the requests and demands that they comply with the laws that require them to keep their chickens on the property.</p><p>"We've been trying to work with them for well over a year," Reynolds said.</p><p>He added, "If there hadn't been a nuisance, we wouldn't be involved." He said the Yolos cannot allow their birds to wander into Fulton Road, where they create a hazard to themselves and to surprised motorists, or to trespass into the uncompleted Woodbridge subdivision next door.</p><p>Margaret Yolo said she has made attempts to corral the chickens into the spacious wire pen behind the house, but so far the campaign hasn't gone well. The birds are elusive, and it's become clear the enclosure is not chicken-proof.</p><p>"Every night when I go in here," she said, "four or five chickens follow me in. The next morning, they're gone."</p><p>She and Dan, who's 83 and a retired hay dealer, have asked their four kids and their grandkids to help them fortify the pen and get the chickens into it.</p><p>Though the court appearance and the fine drove home to Margaret that things must change, she admitted it's dismaying to be in trouble for doing the same things she and the chickens have done for more than 50 years.</p><p>"The whole thing makes me mad," she said. "I've lived here a long time and this all used to be farmland. I know it's not anymore."</p><p>She said her late in-laws owned 60 acres there and gave her and Dan just less than an acre after they were married in 1953. She remembers when it was rare for a car to pass by on Fulton Road and when "there wasn't even a stop sign down at Guerneville Highway."</p><p>There was an old vineyard on the land where the new homes were built, and for decades the Yolo chickens would wander by and nobody gave a hoot. Some of the new neighbors don't mind the chickens, either.</p><p>"I love 'em," said Angela Perez, whose Woodbridge home is close to the Yolo property. "I wish I could live in the country."</p><p>Perez said the first night her family slept in the new house, everybody wondered if they could put up with the rooster noise. The decided they could.</p><p>So have Jason and Christa Cheek, who live a few doors down from the Perez clan.</p><p>"We're used to it," Christa said. Her husband said with an accepting shrug, "The chickens were here before us."</p><p>One of the Woodbridge neighbors most disturbed by the birds, Bob Hoyas, allows that unrestrained farm fowl weren't a problem back in the old days on Fulton Road. But, he argues, these are new days.</p><p>"Fulton used to be a little two-laner, now it's a four-lane freeway," Hoyas said. What was country "is a city now," he said.</p><p>Hoyas is one of the residents who's complained to city and county authorities about the noise and the unwelcome presence of unconfined roosters.</p><p>He said that when he bought one of the first new houses on Tedeschi Drive a year ago, he was aware there were chickens on the ranch across the fence. He assumed that they would be maintained in accordance with the law.</p><p>"The whole thing is so danged ridiculous," Hoyas said. But he insisted the roosters really are a problem, one that could easily be remedied if the neighbors would cull the flock to a few dozen hens (city regulations allow 46 chickens on a lot the size of the Yolos') and maybe one or two roosters.</p><p>"The roosters are the culprits here," Hoyas said. "The issue is that these roosters constantly, until the sun is well set, are crowing in an antagonized state."</p><p>Across the fence, Margaret Yolo remained dismayed that such a fuss has been stirred over chickens. She doesn't know if it will work out to put all the testy roosters in one pen, and right now she can't worry about it.</p><p>She's got 30 days to catch the chickens, and she figures she'll need every minute.</p><p>Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.</p>