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Nobody fesses up to urban roosters

By MARLENE SOKOL
Published March 4, 2005

TOWN 'N COUNTRY - I can't hear it.

Maybe it's the wind, unusually strong for a February afternoon. Maybe it's the chatter of high schoolers hanging out and children playing and a teenager pushing her nephew in a stroller.

An odd-looking dog saunters among the little houses off Hulsey Road. An ice cream truck sits in a corner yard. This is Town 'N Country - friendly, informal, bursting with character.

I don't hear the roosters.

Roberto Negron hears them crow all the time. So does Charlie Jalo. "They're doing it all day long," he says.

In the condominiums just south of the subdivision, they are a boardroom punch line.

"Did you get there on time?" . . . "Yeah, the roosters woke me up."

Somebody's keeping the roosters and chickens. They must be.

But who?

We've written before about urban roosters. Of Wheezy in Hyde Park North. Of the notion that, as we yearn for simpler times, we regard roosters as trendy and cute.

In doing so, we ruffled feathers.

At 40, Negron is holding down a job and a full course load at Hillsborough Community College. He needs his sleep. He needs his study time. He can manage neither with a flock in his yard. He'll admit he's heaved oranges to shoo them away.

He's called the Hillsborough County government.

A code inspector went door to door and could not find anyone to own up to the roosters.

And so, the inspector e-mailed Negron, she could not cite anybody.

She checked with Animal Services, which told her it doesn't mess with livestock.

Her suggestion? Hire a trapper.

"I bet if there were cows that were just turned loose, something would be done about them," Negron says.

He's called around to feed stores and livestock auctions, also to no avail.

As I stroll the block, one eye out for the odd-looking (but friendly enough) dog, I don't find many who share Negron's outrage.

The teenagers don't mind the roosters. Then again, they don't see (or hear) as much of them as Negron and Jalo do.

One 10-year-old girl says the roosters have chased her. But she's not too traumatized.

Who knows? Their owner might be in it for the eggs. "Maybe it's somebody from the islands," says Negron, aware that in some cultures a rooster sounds like home.

The lore is that a homeowner used to keep the birds, then moved out and abandoned them. Some suspect that they have a new keeper. But will they confront this person?

Not hardly. That's not how it's done when you live in a neighborhood.

And not everybody believes there is a rooster keeper in their midst.

Condo dweller Michael Bernard says the fact that they migrate makes it unlikely they have a permanent home.

He's made peace with the noise, but his yard is suffering. "They ate all my grass seed, and now I can't seed my lawn," he says.

Last summer's hurricanes left the condo association with costly repair bills. So it might not rush to hire a trapper.

And who knows if Negron will get that desperate?

I stay long enough to to commiserate, to cluck (sorry), to hear Jalo chide Negron for not inviting him over for a barbecue, for the two to swear this is a very friendly street.

Then I hear one. It's a little far off, but definitely a rooster. A voice as loud as anyone else's.

It sounds musical, but I don't live here. It sounds tropical, but I get to sleep at night. It's a nuisance, but no one seems ready to take that next radical step.

It remains, for now, just something to talk about.

[Last modified March 3, 2005, 09:12:11]