Neighbors Told to Reach Accord on Rowdy Rooster

A judge ordered two Agoura Hills residents Thursday to seek a compromise in their dispute over a raucous rooster named Sir Lancelot.

Mary Lewis, a 52-year-old widow, is charged with keeping a nuisance. Her neighbor, Andrea Lenert, contends that Sir Lancelot’s late-night crowing keeps her awake.

“Just as you’re about to go to sleep, he starts crowing again,” Lenert, 40, said outside the courtroom of Malibu Municipal Judge Lawrence J. Mira.

Lewis, though, contends that noise from the likes of roosters, coyotes and screech owls is part of everyday rural life in Old Agoura, a part of Agoura Hills where many residents keep horses and other farm animals.

“It’s our life style. If he does crow, it’s a couple of times, and that’s the end of it,” Lewis said.

The judge continued the case Thursday to allow Lewis to install more fencing around the rooster’s pen. If the fencing muffles the noise, the case will be dismissed on April 21, Mira said.

“Two neighbors can resolve this in some way, and therefore effect a more meaningful resolution,” Mira said.

Lewis began work Thursday afternoon on bamboo screens that can be put up at night and removed in the morning.

Lenert, though, warned that assuming the fencing will work might be like counting one’s chickens before they’re hatched.

“I don’t think a little piece of bamboo screening is going to do anything,” Lenert said.

A family friend had given the rooster to Lewis’ late husband, Randy, as a Father’s Day gift in 1984. The dispute with Lenert began a year ago, about a month after Randy Lewis died.

“All I did was go next door and say, ‘Can we confine the rooster at night?’ ” Lenert said. She said Lewis became angry and offered to cut off the animal’s head, but Lenert thought that would be extreme, so she started wearing earplugs at night. One night last summer, the earplugs prevented her from hearing the cries of her sick, 9-year-old son, she said.

“The rooster was causing me to abandon my family,” Lenert said.

For her part, Lewis said that she would never chop off poor Sir Lancelot’s head, that she was being sarcastic. Confining him every night would be difficult because he’s one mean rooster, she said.

Several of Lewis’ other neighbors showed up in court to support her. One of them, Greg Symonds, said of the rooster, “I enjoy hearing him. It’s country. It’s a nice sound. It’s better than freeway noise.”

But Symonds and the others just don’t understand, Lenert said.

“Sleep deprivation is a serious thing,” she said. “This is what they do in torture camps.”