Bev Norwood is part of a movement that has been quietly incubating in backyards across Raleigh for several years now. This weekend, she and some like-minded friends will invite the public to see what they've been up to.

Their passion? Chickens.

"For me, it's all about the eggs," says Norwood, a landscape architect who keeps six chickens she calls her "girlie girls" behind the Five Points bungalow she shares with her husband, Chuck. "We've been trying to eat closer to home -- things that are in season and locally produced. It helps to have fresh eggs."

Handcrafted of recycled wood and covered in fragrant Confederate jasmine, the Norwoods' coop will be one of seven that people can visit on Saturday's first "Hen-side the Beltline Tour d'Coop," a benefit for Urban Ministries of Wake County. Four of the coops featured on the tour lie within a short walk of one another in Five Points. The others are in the White Oak neighborhood by Rothgeb Park, off West Raleigh's Ridge Road and in the Kirby-Bilyeu community near N.C. State University.

The idea for the tour was hatched in January, when Norwood and several fellow chicken enthusiasts gathered in her living room, where a wooden folk-art rooster watches from its perch near the door. They were inspired by local garden tours as well as an annual chicken coop tour held in Portland, Ore., which last year drew more than 300 attendees.

"We want people to understand that it's OK to keep chickens," says Bob Davis, another Five Points resident whose backyard coop will be featured on the tour. "There's nothing freaky about it, and it's easily doable."

A biologist and former schoolteacher who is retired from GlaxoSmithKline, Davis says his poultry fascination began when he was a teenager living on Avon Drive near Five Points. He heard about a boy who lived downtown and kept turkeys, quail and small chickens known as bantams in his backyard and paid him $5 for a bantam hen and her eggs. The purchase launched a 12-year love affair with chickens that was put on hold when Davis moved into an apartment closer to work.

But by the spring of 2001, Davis and his wife, horticulturist Judy Morgan-Davis, were once again living in Five Points when they visited a chicken-keeping friend and came home with two bantam hens. The Davises built a simple coop from wood and chicken wire at the back of their garden, and the flock took off. Today they have nine adult hens and roosters and raise chicks for other city chicken keepers, breeding their birds for the calm, quiet temperament needed to tolerate the noise and bustle of urban life.

"I feel like people in the city have really lost their earth connection," Davis laments. "Chickens are very grounding -- a good way to get back to the earth and natural cycles."

Liberal on poultry

There was a time when chickens were common in communities across North Carolina. In the 1800s, the Mordecai family raised chickens on their plantation north of downtown Raleigh. In their memoir "Having Our Say," Sadie and Bessie Delany describe watching hens lay eggs on the grounds of East Raleigh's St. Augustine's College in the early 1900s. A 1910 agricultural census for North Carolina reported that Wake County was home to "97,930 fowls of all kinds."

After World War II, though, the forces of industrialization began pushing food production further away from the daily lives of most Americans. At the same time, many cities and towns passed ordinances prohibiting chickens. Cary, for instance, permits no chickens within its town limits, while Durham allows them only in its two most rural zoning districts.

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