SANFORD - The 14 chickens in Alexandra Reid's backyard are an orderly flock, content to spend their days quietly scratching in their fenced coop and their evenings roosting in their tidy house.

Not so their owner, who has been running about like one of her charges with its head cut off since an inspector said her birds violated a city ordinance and would have to go.

The ban is all the more frustrating, Reid says, because it appears to be based on a fear that allowing a few chickens would open the town gates and allow Sanford's growing Hispanic population to bring in all manner of livestock.

"It really isn't just about chickens anymore," Reid said this week as she and her daughter, Jordan, worked on egg-shaped picket signs for a demonstration before a City Council meeting.

Indeed, Bob Davis, who has long tended chickens at his home in Raleigh's Five Points, has taught classes in the hobby and helps organize the annual Hen-side the Beltline Tour d'Coop, said he has received nearly a dozen calls from people this year asking for advice on how to get their local governments to relax their chicken bans. At least one, he said, was from a community where some feared that Hispanics would exploit an opening.

Until this year, he said, most people who sought his expertise wanted to know how to build a coop, how many chickens to start with and what types, and how to care for them.

"This year," he said, "it's, 'How do I change my community, or my homeowners association or whatever, to get them to allow chickens?' "

Reid has gone before the Sanford City Council twice, and both times the board has refused to take action. She was accompanied at this week's meeting by an 80-year-old neighbor who has kept chickens for 20 years and told the council that it represents the rights for which he fought in World War II.

Council members have not forgotten that a few years ago, the board was compelled to pass an ordinance banning the slaughter of goats and other livestock inside city limits. Some residents, primarily Hispanic, had alarmed their neighbors by buying and killing the animals to prepare for special meals. Town boards in Monroe and Siler City passed similar rules.

Councilman Linwood Mann said he has heard from many constituents who don't want chickens as neighbors. They worry, he said, that newcomers from rural areas of Latin America will bring in their own favorite farm animals.

"This is just one of many ordinances put on the book to help people trying to live in harmony," Mann said. "So far, it has worked very well."

Tony Asion, executive director of El Pueblo, a Latino advocacy group in Raleigh, was mystified.

"What in the world would make them think that all Latinos want to have chickens in their backyard?" Asion asked. "Here's the deal: It has nothing to do with culture. It has to do with where you came from. If you came from a rural area where you had animals in your back yard, that's what you're used to. The same is true in the United States. Maybe in rural Alabama they might have them, but not in Montgomery. I don't think this has anything to do with ethnicity."

Improving the coop

Reid says she wasn't even aware of Sanford's chicken stricture until she had broken it. Her family's affair with the birds began at least three years ago, when a friend gave her children some chicks. The circa-1900 house where the family lives on Lee Avenue, a couple of miles from the heart of downtown, had coops when they bought it 10 years ago, and some neighbors had chickens, too.

The Reids built a hen house and a new coop, siting it farther back from the house on the one-acre lot. It's fenced on the sides and top, to keep the chickens in and hawks and roaming dogs out.

Reid's son and daughter grew the flock, expanding into exotic varieties and competing at regional and state fairs with their 4-H club. They learned to groom the birds for competition. They won ribbons.

Their mother, meanwhile, scouted new recipes for omelets, quiche, frittata. She pushes eggs on neighbors and friends, touting their freshness and organic origin, free of growth hormones.

Carl Anglin, Sanford's code enforcement supervisor, was inspecting new construction at a home two doors down from Reid in March when he caught a glimpse of her coop. He didn't have time to knock on her door that day, he says, but took down the address and sent a form letter.

"What I'm doing is enforcing that ordinance as it's written," said Anglin, who says in 13 years on the job, he has evicted chickens from under people's houses and, in one case, from a spare bedroom a woman had converted to a coop. Anglin said he gets complaints regularly, and attributes many of those to the influx of Hispanic residents in recent years.

"Some of it may be a cultural thing with a large part of our population -- the Hispanic population," Anglin said.

A quiet sorority

Reid took her case to the City Council, sending each member a packet of information on the health and educational benefits of urban chickens and asking that they amend the ordinance. She suggested restrictions on the size of the flock, the distance between a coop and a home, the size lot required, a stipulation that the property be owner-occupied, and a proviso common among poultry keepers: no roosters. A chicken sisterhood is a quiet sorority, but a rooster crowing at 4 a.m. will have the neighbors calling animal control.

In her presentation before the council, Reid cited the rules in other cities, including Raleigh, where chickens are allowed unless they violate health or nuisance standards and where this year's Tour d'Coop drew more than 600 people. At its next council meeting, even Cary plans to discuss rewriting its chicken rules, which currently require at least an acre lot and a permit.

"You can say we allow them," Dan Matthys, Cary's customer resource planner said wryly, "but they'd have to be beige."

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