Crowing roosters--fighting sounds in the wilds of New Jersey

The sound was like a scream, a piercing shriek that marked each morning as predictably as the sunrise. Only much earlier.

The Purtscher family heard it the first night they slept in their new home. It startled the wife, angered the husband, woke up the children. Dan Purtscher couldn’t take it anymore. He went to his new neighbor’s house, introduced himself and asked:

Can’t you shut up that rooster?

The answer was yes, but why should he? “This is a farm,” said the neighbor, Antimo Russano. “A farm with animals.”

And so began the war of nerves between two neighbors in the wilds of western New Jersey, where the barely discernible edge of metropolitan New York cuts like a scalpel into the heart of rural America.

Today, a mediator will consider whether a crowing rooster can constitute the same sort of nuisance as a barking dog and whether the right to farm takes precedence over disturbing the peace. Neither neighbor expects a Solomonic solution, since neither intends to compromise on what each calls a matter of principle.

This seemingly quaint dispute over a loud bird--actually, seven of them--touches on issues that go far beyond these forested hills and cascading creeks on the eastern banks of the Delaware River, one of the most lightly inhabited parts of the most densely settled state in the country.

Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, in her inaugural address last month, made stopping the suburbanization of her state the centerpiece of her second term. She said her goal would be to set aside 1 million acres in the next decade--roughly one-fifth of the state and half of the land that either hasn’t been developed or preserved.

The point is to retain as much of the character of rural New Jersey as possible in an era when more Americans are moving beyond the suburbs in a quest for quiet country living--and at the same time transforming rural communities into woodsier versions of the congested suburbs they fled.

The issue is a complicated one for farmers. Many bristle at attempts by government to limit their ability to sell some of their land to a developer if the crops no longer can pay the bills. Yet they are equally opposed to any effort to control the sights, smells and sounds of their farms, no matter how encircled they become by people from more urban origins.

In places such as Kingwood Township, a five-minute canoe ride from Pennsylvania, any attempt to bring the code of the suburbs to the hinterlands is met with a hoot, a holler and an unbending resolve to protect agrarian traditions.

“You mention farming to these people, and a glaze comes over their eyes and flutes start to play,” said Purtscher, a 47-year-old computer programmer.

Mayor Steven Zdepski said the town of nearly 4,000 people has rallied behind Russano’s roosters.

“Many of us feel this rural character is sacred,” he said. “There’s not too much left.”

Yet the issue is much more complicated than weather-beaten farmers trying to make an iconic stand against suburban creep.

Kingwood Township is in Hunterdon County, one of the nation’s wealthiest and a place where land is just as likely to be used for training quarter horses as growing corn. Whitman comes from a family of Hunterdon landowners.

Like many of the landed gentry, she has benefited from the state’s farmland assessment act, which spares people who own what is considered farmland the crushing property taxes that are the bane of New Jersey’s middle-income suburbanites. People who have never sunk a hoe in the ground save thousands of dollars by leasing a piece of their estates to a farmer, or make a bundle selling it off.

And many of the people in Kingwood aren’t farmers but their heirs. Zdepski, a financial planner, said he lives on two acres that were deeded to him by his father. He also admitted that the township is trying to attract new business to bolster its tax base, because so much assessed farmland doesn’t really bring much tax revenue.

Suburban sprawl has “produced some interesting dilemmas that you wouldn’t think would have arisen,” said James Hughes, dean of the Rutgers University School of Planning and Public Policy.

Often, it is the transplanted suburbanites who are most against development, while many farmers see a new subdivision as a way to cash in--and cash out--after a rough spell of living off the land. To them, said Hughes, “the last crop is blacktop.”

Then there are the suburbanites who are lured by the rural atmosphere but find themselves put off by the smell of manure, or the fact that a farmer may fire up a combine in the middle of the night because the ground was too wet during the day.

And while some farmers may be seduced by a developer’s dollars, others truly are stewards of land that has been in their families for generations but which no longer pays the bills. Hughes cited more than a dozen from East Amwell Township who recently sold their land to the state’s farmland preservation program.

Nowhere is the clash of attitudes demonstrated more clearly than off a lonely forest lane called Milltown Road, where the Purtschers and the Russanos live.

Russano’s place is the realization of his dream to re-create his childhood. He grew up on a farm outside Naples, Italy, tending sheep and harvesting wheat. The family came to the United States in 1953, when he was 14.

He spent the rest of his childhood not on a farm but in Brooklyn. He got a job as a butcher in a supermarket in New Jersey and began saving for the day when he could move back onto a farm. He and his wife, Elisa, bought 15 acres in Kingwood and built a white-brick ranch home a decade ago.

A montage of pictures of John Wayne hangs in the living room, and a statue of the Virgin Mary stands outside the front door. Occasionally, a spectacular black-and-gold rooster named Tom races across the yard, crowing at a duck. “The duck is his friend,” Russano said.

Tom is Russano’s favorite of the seven roosters, 15 chickens, 20 sheep, dozen goats and gaggle of geese he keeps on the place.

It might have been Tom who greeted the Purtschers when they moved here last September.

Dan and Ann Purtscher, longing for the quiet of the countryside, put their house in a nearby suburb up for sale and began renting the handsome brown contemporary that stands about 500 yards from Russano’s house and a 45-minute commute from Purtscher’s job.

After a day of unpacking, they went to bed. Sometime long before sunrise, a rooster crowed. Then another one. It woke up the couple and their two young boys.

“My wife and I sat up in bed and thought: ‘My God, what is that?’ ” Purtscher recalled. “It’s really an obnoxious screech.”

Both sides agree that Purtscher approached the Russanos about keeping the roosters quiet, perhaps by putting them inside the shed at night. And that Russano refused. And laughed.

Russano said Purtscher offered him $100 for each of the birds. Purtscher said that was before he realized how many there were.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Russano said. “The money’s good. But they’re my roosters. . . . They was born here.”

Purtscher went to the township committee, to the mayor, to the township lawyer. He found no sympathy.

“I said: ‘What if this was a dog waking me up?’ ” Purtscher recalled. “They said: ‘Oh, we’d take care of that right away.’ They just make me want to rip my hair out.”

Purtscher sent Russano a registered letter warning him to muzzle his roosters or face possible court action. Russano filed a harassment complaint with the state police. Purtscher responded by filing a noise complaint with the township.

Two weeks ago, a municipal judge ordered the men to make their case to a local mediator, who won’t be able to mandate a solution but is supposed to try to smooth out their differences. Purtscher said he’s not optimistic.

What galls him, he said, is the fact that the township is using Russano to make a statement about its right-to-farm ordinance, which was enacted as a shield against creeping suburban sensibilities.

“This gentleman has 15 acres,” Purtscher said. “It’s timber and scrubland. He has a potbellied pig. He puts his mangy sheep out there and thinks he’s under the right-to-farm act. He’s not a farmer.” Purtscher grew up outside Peoria, Ill., where his father, a building contractor, raised horses, llamas and sheep on the side. “I come from a rural community,” he said.

Russano freely admits he’s just a butcher from Brooklyn. He sells some of the livestock he raises, but farming is “my hobby.” Zdepski owns property that abuts Russano’s and said he’s had run-ins with him. But on this issue, there is no dispute. “He may consider himself a hobby farmer, but he’s got a barn. He’s got chickens. He’s got those roosters,” Zdepski said. “The township’s stand is, he’s got a right to farm.”