Environment | Daily Report

This May 4 update deletes a reference to the Berkeley Daily Planet as “defunct.” The newspaper stopped print publication, but still has a news web site.

Raising chickens in the metropolis has its challenges.

Consider this poster on a telephone pole in the heart of Berkeley’s pricey Elmwood District.

Ashby Avenue is a state highway, often gridlocked, so the chicken is lucky somebody intervened before it tried to cross the road.

The urban chicken movement is a nationwide phenomenon, and it evokes real passion amongst devotees, as Slate has noted.

Of course, the zoning codes enacted in many cities in the 20th century didn’t anticipate that urbanites would want to keep chickens. Poultry fanciers in those locales must join the outlaw urban chicken movement, the Christian Science Monitor says.

In Sacramento, with its rich agricultural heritage, the CLUCK citizens group is pushing to legalize  backyard chicken ranching, according to the Sacramento Press.

Backyard chickens – not roosters – are legal in Berkeley.

Nobody is answering the phone listed on the poster, but research suggests the man who rescued the chicken is Matt Tsang, gardening teacher at Willard Middle School on Telegraph Avenue, which has beautiful vegetable gardens, spring and fall.

As local reporter Bill O’Brien has described them for the Coastal Conservancy’s magazine, the Willard gardens include “3,500 square feet of carrots, potatoes, greens, strawberries, sunflowers, and more, growing in neat rows of raised beds.”  Sixth graders take gardening, together with cooking and nutrition classes.

Unlike Sacramento, Berkeley doesn’t have much of an agricultural heritage – it’s been a university town since inception. Nevertheless, the locals have been attempting to regulate backyard poultry raising for 100 years.

On April 1, 1910, the city council received a petition from several local residents “objecting to the killing of chickens and other fowl on residential property for trade purposes,” an old agenda posted on the city’s web site shows.

In recent years the city has addressed poultry raising only in the context of international affairs. In 2007, the city council joined Austria, Germany, and Switzerland in denouncing the use of battery cages for egg-laying hens, on animal cruelty grounds.

There are other agricultural –  and even pre-agricultural – pursuits in Berkeley.

Last year the Daily Planet had an op-ed piece on how to use lightning (but not thunder) for garden fertilizer.

The East Bay Express recently had a story about what might be termed the urban roadkill movement – guys who cruise the highways picking up dead critters for…reuse, I guess.

A lot of foraging action seemed to be in Bolinas, however.

Berkeley also has flocks of wild turkeys, which live up in Strawberry Canyon behind the UC campus, but descend into residential neighborhoods when they feel like it.

The turkeys are fearless. On New Year’s Day, 2006, I saw a lone turkey standing in the intersection of Telegraph and Durant avenues, refusing to get out of the way of a police car.

The officer gunned his engine and hit the siren. The turkey just stood there.

Finally the officer pulled out into the left lane and drove past. The turkey then turned and walked up the middle of Durant, in the direction of the Top Dog hot dog stand.