and gotten so much enjoyment from them.

Congratulations and have fun! 🐔

4 will keep a small household in eggs pretty well with some extra if you don't use them every day. I like to have 8 to 10 so we have enough eggs to give away to friends.

They are fun to watch. They eat bugs.
In addition to providing eggs.
City ordinance disallows roosters, but allows chickens.

an egg can hear them accross the street. i love the sound . look layen look layen . hehe. lucky you. had a duck that ate snails and bugs . missed her. good eggs too also.

I soooo want a Silkie. The Dr Seuss version of a chicken.

Coops are all over the place. You just can't have noisy roosters.

clucking and early morning crowing of the roosters.

Speaking as someone who has exactly that neighbor.

and the clucking was minor and the squawking when an egg was coming out wasn't too annoying. Someone a block over had a rooster and my neighbor's hens would try to crow back at him.

Yes, chickens are fun to watch, even when they're not your own.

And roosters aren't allowed.

Not one other person , except for my wife who went to one meeting, who said chickens ought to be allowed or that they wanted to have some themselves made it to a single meeting in the past 11 months.

As for my wife, I told her to stay away when it got personal and people were yelling at me.

Sorry you had to go through all that.

That's the thing about "trying something new."
People always seem to want to make it about the person and not the idea. I can't stand how good ideas are diminished by others' distrust of the person presenting them. It's a level of ignorance that most people can't even see they're stuck in.

Roosters are great in the country, especially when the hens are really, really free range. Predators show up, from hawks to foxes, the roosters kicu up a fuss, the hens flap their way up to some low enough tree branches, and the rooster follows them. He serves a function besides keeping them happy and the eggs fertilized, he keeps them safe.

In towns and cities, not so. A lot of people will complain bitterly that the little bastards wake them up between 4 and 5 AM every day--again, great if you're a farmer with cows that need milking. If you're an accountant or work second shift, not so much.

So stick to laying hens who will produce infertile eggs. They're remarkably inoffensive, especially if you keep the area tidy and spilled feed doesn't start drawing rodents.

(My gran kept roosters in the city. No one who had ever tasted what she turned them into for a Sunday dinner ever objected)

The feed will be kept in a metal trash can with a tight lid

The fencing will be 1/4" 19 gauge hardware cloth and the run will have a roof.

to discourage critters that dig under fences to get at their chicken dinners.

One of my neighbors years ago didn't put a roof on her chicken run, with obvious results. I loved to see the ladies pecking in my yard, I'd open the gate to the veg garden and they'd all run in. I never had to deal with hormorms or potato bugs and I had few cabbate loopers. Plus, they provided a side dressing of chicken shit for the plants. Win-win with happy chickens.

And also have another 12 inches on the outside just below the surface perpendicular to the upright fence.

We agreed, as did the other neighbors, so a high school girl across the street got a few chickens. She kept them for 3 or 4 years. No bother at all. We didn't even notice.

So that strategy wouldn't have worked for me

A couple weeks ago, I happened to be in another part of town when I saw 4 really pretty chickens nonchalantly walking around a neighborhood. I was about to take a picture when a postal carrier who was delivering mail showed up. She told me the person they belong to was on her route and she would let them know that their chickens had gotten out. It was all very cordial.