Neighbors’ chickens ruffle feathers in Bishop

Reporting from Bishop, Calif.

Two redheads got the feathers flying. Lucy and Goose were just tending to their business of clucking, laying eggs and pecking up bugs in Laura Smith’s backyard.

“They’re like vacuum cleaners,” Smith said. “There isn’t a bug or a spider out here.”

But not everyone was enamored of the industrious exterminators. A neighbor of Smith’s in the J Diamond mobile home park complained to city officials, pointing to a 1966 ordinance that prohibits “any poultry or animal yard” within 100 feet of a residence. Smith replied that the ordinance applied to commercial chicken yards, not pets.

“I know some people will say, ‘This is just about a few silly chickens,’ ” Smith said. “But there’s a lot more to it. It’s about our basic freedoms. It’s about being told what you can and cannot do .... We’re a rural community .... What’s the big deal about having a couple of chickens in Bishop?”

The big deal is that Smith is a City Council member. Her refusal to get rid of Lucy and Goose based on her interpretation of the law struck some as an abuse of power. Others, mostly chicken owners who worried that their coops’ days might be numbered, backed Smith.

In January, the City Council took up the issue. At a nearby public hearing, the boss of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which all but colonized Bishop and the Owens Valley to siphon its water, was explaining the agency’s plans for the area.

Nevertheless, chickens drew one of the biggest City Council audiences in memory.

Bishop’s birds have stirred an emotional debate that goes beyond domesticated poultry. It’s caused this Eastern Sierra town of 3,600 to examine its identity: Is Bishop city or country? It’s pitted natives against transplants derided as “flatlanders,” and uncorked resentments rooted in the long-ago water grab.

“It caught me off-guard,” said Mayor Jeff Griffiths, who recused himself from the matter because of a conflict of interest: His son once kept chickens for a 4-H project. “I can’t go to the grocery store without people stopping me to ask about chickens. I ran an ultra-marathon and when I passed the aid stations, people asked: ‘How’s the chicken issue going?’ ”

No one knows how many chickens there are in Bishop. A century ago, the Owens Valley was fat with poultry and egg farms, and Bishop was the hub of the industry. Merchant G.H. Dusenbery built an egg ranch and packaging plant three miles west of town where 3,000 hens produced an average of 1,650 eggs a day.

“It’s a foregone conclusion that as Owens Valley’s new development progresses a host of hens will be sitting on top of the world and the eggs will be rolling everywhere,” a 1928 story in The Times predicted.

Today, Bishop is a paradox, both city and country. To the west, the Sierra looms like a cathedral. To the east, the Owens River runs thick through the dry landscape like an artery pumping blood through dead tissue.

Within Bishop’s 2-square-mile city limits, it’s a different story. Main Street is traffic-choked and homes in cozy neighborhoods sit on standard 50-by-100-foot urban lots. With only 2% of Inyo County privately owned — most of the rest is federal land — attitudes toward personal space are deeply ingrained.

“There are people who’d like to go back to the days when we had no sidewalks or gutters and no fences and you could see your neighbors,” said Frank Crom, 70, a former mayor and council member and a vocal opponent of chickens. “But times change .... We’re so jammed in together.”

Generalizations are tricky, but the anti-chicken people tend to be older folks and natives concerned about noise, disease and property values. As for the other side, younger people with children, or those who moved to Bishop looking for a faint echo of Thoreau’s Walden, find the daily offering of fresh eggs to be transcendental — and delicious.

“A lot of people like myself feel we’re a rural community,” said Pete Watercott. “It’s what I love about Bishop.”

Watercott, 58, is a walking daguerreotype, cowboy-lean in straight-leg denim and boots, with slicked-back hair and a handlebar mustache. Better known by his stage name, Fiddlin’ Pete, he has been performing western music at events along the Eastern Sierra for more than 30 years.

“When people ask me, ‘Where you from?,’ I tell them that’s a loaded question,” Watercott said. “Technically, I’m from Minnesota. But if I say I’m from Bishop, the natives will say, ‘Pete, you may have lived here for 30 years, but you’re not from Bishop.’ ”

Watercott, a skilled carpenter, and his wife Kathryn Erickson have fashioned a country oasis on their double lot within sight of Main Street: Fruit trees and a greenhouse. A tiny vineyard from which they produce wine stored in an underground cellar. A burbling fake creek and pond loaded with bluegills and bass.

Then there is the chicken coop — a spacious two-story cottage with a roof. It currently sleeps seven.

“We could put a horse and a cow out there,” Erickson said jokingly. “How about goats?”

Erickson’s humor masks an anger she and other pro-chicken people harbor about comments by City Council member Bruce Dishion, a retired Bishop police chief who said that people raising chickens were knowingly breaking the law.

“I felt like I was harassed and attacked,” Erickson said. “It was very cop-like.”

“I have a thicker skin. This isn’t my first rodeo,” said Dishion, 61. “I just believe in obeying the law.”

Chickens became the topic of barbershop discussion. One council member said constituents began “tattling” on neighbors for all sorts of matters, not just illicit hens.

Anonymous comments on the local Sierra Wave news website revealed an incivility that, though mild compared with the standard poison oozing from Internet chat rooms, surprised many in Bishop.

Consider the exchange between “Virginia” and “Best Friend”:

“I wonder if Chicken-liver ... oops, I mean Chicken-Lover, has ever had the joy of trying to sleep through the screeching of hens being attacked by Racoons, coyotes, or even dogs,” Virginia wrote.

“Virginia, Please go back to your own planet. Better yet, Lock yourself in your house and eat your furniture,” wrote Best Friend. “Go back to Metropolis, where superman protects you from all the big, scary and stinky farm animals. Bishop will be ok without one more flatlander type.”

“It is obvious that you are a young, smart-a-- who probably moved from LA to Mammoth, couldn’t afford to live there and ended up here.”

“I was born here. You’re obviously a hypocrite.”

Griffiths, the mayor, said the chatter stirred up emotions and “put people on both sides into their trenches.”

“In Bishop, we solve our problems face to face. You tend to be more civil that way because you’re going to see that person at the grocery, you’re going to see them at church and serve with them on the Mule Days committee,” he said. “We haven’t had a history with the kind of vitriol that happens on the Internet.”

The acrimony bubbled over on Home Street during a heated discussion that ended with the cops being called.

Clifford Crickette, 81, says he’s never liked his next-door neighbor, although it’s hard to pin down why except for a vague complaint involving a noisy rototiller. Larry Clark, 62, swears he has no animosity toward Crickette — although he does have a problem with his four chickens.

“He’s raising them right outside our bedroom window,” Clark said. “Those chickens wake us up every morning. And they give off an odor that makes my wife’s asthma and allergies act up.”

Clark spoke out on the chicken issue before the City Council. That ticked off Crickette. One day, the two exchanged words in front of Crickette’s home.

“He kept saying, ‘You’re trying to get my chickens killed!’ ” Clark said.

“He kept asking me why I didn’t like him,” said Crickette, whose shock of white hair, weathered face and salty language give him the bearing of a 19th century sea captain. “I told him, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ ”

Then he sprayed Clark with a garden hose.

Clark dialed 911.

Police calmed everyone down, but Crickette has no intention of getting rid of his chickens.

“I’m keeping them just to keep him pissed off,” he said. “And for the fresh eggs.”

City Administrator Rick Pucci says that in his 30 years on the job, there have been occasional complaints about backyard chickens, but they were resolved quickly and amicably. That the issue is contentious now is a sign of the times, he said.

“Today there are just more and more requests for the city to get involved in disputes because neighbors don’t get along with each other,” Pucci said. “So they come to the government to settle things.”

Eventually the City Council concluded it could not settle this dispute, owing to the fact that two of its five members either owned, or had owned, chickens. So voters will decide in November.

The ballot measure, if approved, would allow residents to have up to four chickens or rabbits or a combination of the two as long as coops and food are kept 20 feet from a neighbor’s property line. The referendum will cost taxpayers about $2,500 — the price of finding out what kind of town Bishop wants to be.

“I’m going to beat the bushes so it passes 5 to 1,” Watercott said.

“What gets me,” his wife added, “is why are we spending several thousand dollars to decide something that’s that stupid? If the City Council can’t decide something like this, what are they going to do when a serious issue comes up?”

mike.anton@latimes.com