In California City, a Chicken-Coop Tour

BEVERLY HILLS has its Garden Tour; the Hamptons, its Designer Showhouse.

Yet for sheer visual pluck, nothing surpasses the trellised residence of Boss Lady, a Silver Laced Wyandotte chicken, set amid formal boxwood hedges beneath a fig tree from which ripe fruit drop like bonbons.

The coop, in Ann M. Evans’s backyard, was one of 18 stops on the 16-mile Tour de Cluck at the beginning of this year’s season of chicken coop tours in this city, which ends this weekend. The tour, a biking expedition complete with “coop docents,” included about 700 chicken keepers, wannabes and looky-loos who pondered the increasingly intense relationship among kitchen, coop and garden.

“They have a little bit of terroir in their eggs,” Ms. Evans, a former mayor who helped found this city’s farmers’ market, said of her “girls,” as most chicken keepers insist on calling their birds. “They make me feel like I’m living on a self-sufficient farm even in my suburban community.”

The Tour de Cluck, which attracted legions of coop jocks in bike helmets, some in zany chicken fashion statements, is part of a boomlet in chicken voyeurism, including tours this summer in Seattle; Salem, Ore.; and Santa Fe, N.M.

Madison, Wis., has had a tour since 2005. This year’s annual Funky Chicken Coop Tour in Austin, Tex., on the day before Easter, drew 2,500 visitors in six hours.

Unlike decorator show-houses, with their tasseled draperies, coop tours attract people searching for practical and ingenious solutions that will result in the ultimate prize: a summer of frittatas, soufflés and huevos rancheros pridefully made from their own fresh eggs.

“There is a strong belief here in shortening the food miles,” said Jacqueline Clemens, who founded the Tour de Cluck four years ago. She and her husband, Ed, routinely swap eggs from their coop, a quaint cottage with sage-green shutters and geraniums in the window, for their neighbors’ fava beans, tomatoes and Meyer lemons.

The couple’s two chickens — Hazel, a Rhode Island Red, and Gertie, a Gold Laced Wyandotte — produce a dozen or so eggs a week, which are kept in a traditional wooden egg holder in the kitchen until it is time to make strata or other favorite dishes. “The coop has become an extension of the pantry,” Ms. Clemens said.

Davis (population 65,000), a university town just west of Sacramento, has an estimated 200 coops, many bearing silly names like Cluckingham Palace. The tour, which benefits the Davis Farm to School program, reflects the ethos of a place where bumper-sticker pleas to “Buy Fresh/Buy Local” and “Plant Seeds & Sing Songs” are somewhat de rigueur. The city, which pioneered the bike lane, is an agricultural stronghold, exemplified by the University of California at Davis, the original farm school for the Berkeley campus and now home to a viticulture and oenology department.

The tour has become such a phenomenon that politicians running for office are expected to take part in a clucking contest (each gets an “I Had the Courage to Cluck” certificate). They can distract themselves afterward by wolfing down bacon and egg popsicles or made-to-order omelets cooked by local farmers at the Fowl Food Fair, a one-day offshoot of the Davis Farmers’ Market.

It can all get quite deep. Amelia Naim-Hansen, a 30-year-old teacher, and her partner, Robert Huston, 40, a contractor, house their flock in a coop called the Copper Top Kibbutz. They describe their chickens as if they were on JDate.com or Match.com.

There is Peaches: “social, active, cuddly, voracious digger, loves bugs, inquisitive, softly coos and gurgles.”

And Henrietta: “Shy, quiet, curious. A little mischievous in the garden.”

The housing requirements for chickens are quite specific: they need protection from the weather, predators and their own wanderlust. They thrive on darkness and confinement; when the sun sets, their metabolism slows, making them vulnerable to raccoons, owls, snakes and other stalkers. (Spotted around town: solar-powered coop doors.)

The Kibbutz is part of a multilayered backyard food system, nestled among heirloom pole beans, garlic, baby orange and nectarine trees, melons, edible calendula flowers and scented geraniums for tea.

The chickens fertilize the garden, often dining on snails, caterpillars and other pests. The couple eat eggs every day for breakfast, adding fresh ingredients from the garden like chard or kale. Vegetable scraps are fed to the chickens. Mr. Huston uses eggs for tiramisù; Ms. Naim-Hansen, upside-down strawberry cardamom cake.

Like their chickens, the couple have lived communally, including a stint at The Domes, a student-built housing cooperative at the university, built in the 1970s, that had resident chickens. Their backyard brims with life, the galvanized steel mesh of the coop filtering the light like stained glass in a nave. As tour-goers admired his handiwork, Mr. Huston confessed, “My ego is flowing.”

He had some stiff competition: like many coop tours, the Tour de Cluck has an admissions committee, and there is no early decision. This year’s coops spanned the stylistic horizon, from one fashioned of three metal dog crates to another with crystal doorknobs. The chief criterion is that the coop be run responsibly — as Ms. Clemens put it, “Do your neighbors like your chickens?”Diplomacy is essential, particularly in the summer, said Alicia Rheal, a founder of Mad City Chickens, in Madison. Wis. She plies neighbors with quiches, angel food cakes, egg salad Citizenly dos and don’ts, in the form of local ordinances, are a hot topic on online forums like backyardchickens.com. Many cities, including Davis, limit the number of hens and do not allow roosters for noise reasons. Most regulate a coop’s distance from neighbors. In nearby Vacaville, a skirmish erupted recently about an $840 fine on a chicken owner who violated local rules about keeping poultry on less than an acre.

Like raising children, how one keeps chickens is a matter of personal philosophy. “Unlike some moms, I don’t spoil my chickens,” Ms. Evans said — before admitting that in the fall, she makes quince digestifs by soaking her homegrown quinces in vodka for two months and then, after decanting, gives the fruit to the chickens.

In Austin, many keepers swap eggs — trading, say, blue-green eggs from Ameraucanas for chocolate-brown or coppery Marans. Although taste is subjective, eggs from chickens that have access to forage and bugs have a greater omega-3 fatty acid content than those from large-scale cage operations, said Dr. Bruce Charleton, a diagnostician for the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory system.

At the tour in Davis, the atmosphere was buoyant as cyclists zoomed, or meandered, from coop to coop, following adhesive, chicken-yellow directional arrows stuck to the street.

Among those paying the $15 admission was Dawn Dillman, a student and mother of two who was wearing a cock-a-doodle-doo T-shirt, even though she lives in an apartment and has no chickens.   “It’s kind of a bucket-list thing,” she said before having  the bottom of her shoes spritzed with Lysol for sanitary reasons, a tour ritual. “If you live in Davis, you have to do the Tour de Cluck.”

At the Sunwise Cooperative, a communal house for humans, chickens were scratching and taking dust baths near a compost bin decorated with a hand-painted sign that offered the yogic greeting “Namaste.”

The cooperative, a stop on the tour and part of Village Homes, a pioneering ecology-minded subdivision designed in the 1970s, includes a community orchard where residents pick figs, apricots, cherries, persimmons and pistachios.

Tim Richards, 25, who described himself as “funemployed,” was tending the household’s 11 chickens with his housemate Derek Downey, a 26 year-old beekeeper. In their kitchen, shared with six others, mint tea was steeping in a Mason jar. Prickly pears for making mead were drying by the back door.

It is life sunny side up.

“We all eat honey and eggs every day,” Mr. Richards said. “It’s kind of absurd how blessed we are.”