Cock-a-Doodle-Don’t

Jo Lyons sure wished her neighbor’s rooster would make a “Chicken Run” out of Yorba Linda. So she marched to City Hall and made it happen. It gave her something to crow about.

Without a doubt, the neighbor’s dog that barks the hours away is the cliche of the suburbs. But ask county code enforcement officers and they’ll tell you that the king of public nuisance calls is the rooster.

“The most frequently complained about animals are roosters, followed by peacocks,” said Allan Metz, Orange County’s chief code enforcement officer. “There isn’t even a third place.”

Barking dogs usually spark a simple war of words--or quiet seething--in the neighborhood. “People are more temperate with dogs. They tolerate them better,” said Metz. But roosters . . . well, let’s just say they make the feathers fly.

“This guy just started crowing earlier and earlier,” said Lyons, 62. She took her complaint to City Hall recently after a week of taking sleeping pills to try to block out the moonlight serenades of a particularly relentless bantam. She had just come home from major surgery, she said, and found the rooster’s crows more annoying than ever.

“Pretty soon, he was making a racket at 2 in the morning and doing it every 25 seconds,” Lyons said. “It got to the point where I was anticipating the next crow, and that made it even harder to sleep.”

Needless to say, Lyons and her rooster-owning neighbors aren’t on speaking terms.

Ruffled Feathers Arise in Rural-Urban Flap

These kinds of complaints have been coming in at a steady clip in Yorba Linda, where several residents have cried foul over the early morning racket caused by roosters with less-than-golden throats and lousy internal clocks. The city is handling four such cases right now, said Pat Haley, director of community development.

Yorba Linda--like other cities in the Southland--is transforming from a rural past to a suburban future, she said, and that has caused a clash between rural sensibilities and suburban sensitivities.

Meanwhile, in Woodland Hills, Larry Zimmerman offered his neighbor $1,000 for his noisy rooster on Sale Avenue, but the bird wasn’t for sale, his neighbor said. So Zimmerman, 71, seethes.

“Paying $1,000 for a rooster is not normal, but that’s how desperate I am,” said Zimmerman. “In fact, I’d pay more than $1,000.”

He has offered to pay to remove the rooster’s voice box. He has even threatened to sue. But the law is not on his side.

Here, the fighting line between the suburban and the semirural is literal: Zimmerman lives on the residential side of Sale Avenue; his neighbor of more than 20 years lives across the street, in the residential agricultural zone. As long as the rooster is kept more than 100 feet from another structure, it can crow all it wants.

As a rule, Orange County acts on individual nuisance complaints. It’s not the county’s wish to zero in on particular species, Metz said, just on individual troublemakers. Any animal that is loud is a potential target for code enforcement, he said.

But many cities, including Anaheim and Santa Ana, have outright banned roosters, although complaints still come in, an Anaheim official said. Communities in counties from Riverside to Ventura have tried to roust the roosters.

That’s not so easy to do, though, because rooster owners tend to become rather attached to them. Kathy Francis, a spokeswoman for the Orange County Animal Care Center, said her department tries to give options to people who are cited. She remembers one young Tustin girl who recently hatched an egg for a class that turned out to be a rooster. Last November, neighbors started to complain.

So Francis “swapped her rooster for a hen.” Some people are so enamored of their roosters, she said, that they have their bird’s voice box removed so they can keep them.

Many residents in semirural neighborhoods say roosters aren’t only good companions, but add character to communities that are quickly losing their rustic roots.

“If you’ve never had a baby rooster, they’re the cutest things--and they make the cutest little attempts to crow,” said Debbie Manos, 47, a Yorba Linda resident who had to give up all of her roosters over the last three years after five code-enforcement citations. She gave her last rooster, a Rhode Island red named D.J., to Fullerton College.

Manos said she’s always wanted to have a farm. She has two horses and several hens. A handmade rooster flag sometimes flies defiantly over her house.

Who Rules the Roost Determines Fowls’ Fate

The people who have turned her birds in are “city folk,” she said. “I like the noise roosters make, their sounds. It relaxes me, it makes me feel like I’m in the country--which is a good place to be.

“Sometimes I think I’m in the wrong state.”

To Ramon Abreu, president of the Buena Park-based Southern California chapter of the Assn. for the Preservation of Game Fowl, the debate comes down to a community’s pecking order.

“The question comes down to who the dominant group is. Ordinances are usually made to appease these people,” he said.

For some, roosters and other barnyard animals hark back to a rural past that people of different cultures find comforting, Abreu said.

“Some people like the idea of having this crow in the morning. It reminds them of their rural roots. And also that a new day is coming.”

Indeed, a visit down the roads of Modjeska Canyon, an unincorporated county area inside the Cleveland National Forest, shows a whole new level of poultry tolerance.

Here, roosters strut freely. A sign around a bend reads: “Drive Slowly, Children and Animals Everywhere.” It’s true. Sounds echo throughout the verdant canyon--the sounds of ducks, peacocks, goats, cows. But above all else, roosters.

Fred Vogel, 91, a World War II veteran and Pearl Harbor survivor, says Modjeska residents wouldn’t have it any other way:

“There’s a rule in the canyon: There will be goats, there will be pigs, there will be roosters and chickens and all kinds of other animals. And you must learn to live with them.”

Vogel’s home, itself, is dedicated to birds: He has been making bird feeders for people for more than two decades and sells wild birds.

A woman complained to county code enforcement about a rooster going into her frontyard, Vogel said. “That was stupid. Why would she do that here?” The rooster continued to roam.

In Modjeska Canyon, the dominant ethos is rural, said Ralph Voehl--an owner of a 3-year-old rooster named Bob, after his neighbor. Sure, neighbors complain about each other’s roosters. But those arguments go somewhat differently than elsewhere, Voehl said.

“My neighbor complained once because my rooster was in his front yard,” Voehl said. “I said ‘So what?’ He said, ‘Well, it doesn’t fight fair with my roosters.’ ”

Across a nearby creek, another neighbor keeps penguins and owls.

For her part, Lyons, the Yorba Linda woman who marched to City Hall to do something about her neighbor’s rooster, said she used to own chickens and roosters as a child in northern Illinois. During World War II, her father built an incubator.

“I had a favorite chicken as an 8-year-old,” she said. “I’d gathered many an egg and plucked many a chicken over the years. . . . So I’m not a city person.”

But she would appreciate it if her neighbors’ roosters would confine their crowing to dawn.

Still, ask Richard Bonaparte, and he’ll tell you people in Orange County have it easy. For 37 years, the now part-time code officer in Yorba Linda was the senior code enforcement officer in West Covina, a city that has a reputation for strange animal problems. Like many Orange County cities, West Covina once had a more rural feel, he said.

Bonaparte and his officers found a lion in one house, the cage built into a room. In another house he found an alligator in a baby pool. Not to mention an ocelot.

“A nasty little thing. Looks like a little leopard,” the 63-year-old Bonaparte said.

Then, of course, there was Moe, the chimp that injured a police officer and bit the tip off a woman’s finger last year before being shipped to a way station, Bonaparte said.

And roosters? “In West Covina, we had a street full of roosters,” Bonaparte said. “And nobody would own up to them.”