Loud Chicken, annoying neighbors

[Mybackyardpeepers]

I have a new layer who has to let everyone know when ever anyone is in the nesting box, that's just her personality. My closest neighbor grew up with chickens and thinks her singing is hilarious!

 

[rosemarythyme]

Whenever she lays an egg its pretty loud and when one chicken lays an egg, they come out squaking and make all the other chickens squack too.

This is very normal, it's not just your "loud" chicken. Not all will do it, but it's not unusual that more than one bird will sing the egg song at a time.

 

[PirateGirl]

you are right, the loudest time is egg laying time, and that usually happens INSIDE the coop... perhaps you could relocate your coop to be further from the complaining neighbor, or perhaps you can insulate the coop to better soundproof it. Be sure if you do something like this that you let your neighbor know that you are working on a project to dampen the sound, they might appreciate that you are doing something and their complaints have not gone unnoticed

 

[Loudy]

We cannot relocate our coop, because the other side is for "play" and exercise. It's also closer too our other neighbors

 

[lilchickenz]

So how did it work out? I think I'm going to try to soundproof my coop a bit.

 

[Alexr]

It's a bit of an older thread, but maybe someone follows up....
Last Friday Animal control came with an abatement warrant and ceased our nine chicken. We live in Hollister, CA, and the code clearly states "No person shall have more than six live poultry......<snip>.....on any property" and with a family of six we thought to be quite amicable with nine. We are truly rural here, so we thought their intention was to be somehow in line with the amount of eggs per person or so. Either way, we got one complaint last November over a rooster we never had, and upon inspection they complained about the amount of chicken and gave us a citation of 100 USD. I rebutted it, never got a follow up, it was never collected and when they came here with an abatement warrant we genuinely felt kind of raided. After much of a fuzz we made over the weekend they returned them into their coop yesterday, so the next Monday. I contacted local TV news, all top officials of the city, city attorney, every lawyer with an emergency number, I even found an identical case in circumstance in San Jose, CA. I even reached our mayor on his private cell on his vacation in Canada. But San Jose has a very clear city code and even a protocol for filing a complaint to establish if an officer deals with a case of someone being overly sensitive or not. The reason we started going down this road is that the chicken are our daughter's aged eight and ten, they tend to them, have names for each of them. The chicken know them and eat off their hands and they pet them, and chicken are truly as capable of having relationships to people and appreciate being cared for and treated kindly as any animal if you care to take the time to observe them.

We have that one, single neighbor who complains about everything and anything, everybody knows about him, he complains also about our other neighbor just working in the garden and listening to his iPod at really low volume, it's ridiculous. And since we do have a clause in our code clearly allowing six chicken per, well, something, I would expect people moving here reading the code before deciding to do so as we did. It's like first you move to earth and then you complain about a blue sky....move somewhere with more sulfur in the atmosphere and you should be good.

Either way, we surveyed the neighbors yesterday, nobody except that one takes an issue, in fact one neighbor was even inspired by our chicken and has started to get some themselves. All like the chicken and their usually quiet pecking away while making this typical sound like my grandma considering a serious question when I was five years old or so.

When I got the citation and given the code I did not go to court, I responded with a sworn affidavit to the chief of police, who was the person named at the top of the citation. I did so because the citation if compared to a traffic ticket was essentially saying "you are to pay 100USD for driving 45 miles/h in a 45 miles/h zone". It seemed obvious to me that rather than a debate in law it's a matter of a staff member incapable of reading the code section used as the basis for the citation. I can expect an officer to read the code, or, if not, ask his boss to read it to them and clarify what it means.

But the police chief never attached my letter to our file, nor forwarded it to the animal control department, nothing, and so to them it appeared we were unwilling to even communicate. One part of my initial response was that I complained that they entered our property without a warrant. They can stand at the fence and ask to speak to me, I don't have to let anyone in without a warrant, and I like this discretion to offer entry on a per-case basis. Why wouldn't I, I didn't built a fence for fun but to make sure I can meet my responsibilities to the line of that fence, outside of which people can slip and fall or cause themselves whatever reason for unhappiness with my involvement being easy to disprove.

So for lack of any follow up communication nor a new citation about a noise nuisance, I had no reason to be aware of any issue. After this terrible weekend then for our family and now that the chicken are back, we got time to find a solution for the three chicken. We are not sure what to do. Our neighbors to the other side might take them, that way our kids can still tend to them. Or an alternative might be to build an underground chicken coop which would insulate a lot from sound as most of the egg-laying noise happens inside the coop. I am not sure what else there is, it might even be a matter of to many chicken as chicken have an upper limit of managing relationships, usually I think up to five other chicken, above that they start splitting into two or more groups. Maybe that's the reason for the noise.