Over the summer, the Moline City Council passed an ordinance allowing people to raise backyard chickens. Soon, residents of Davenport and Rock Island could be able to keep them, too.
But recently, it's been a more polarizing discussion than you might expect.
When columnist Shane Brown wrote last month in the Dispatch and Rock Island Argus "If you're a fan of backyard chickens, you won't find a happy ending here," he didn't anticipate ruffling any feathers.
"Apparently all the people who are in favor of backyard chickens in Rock Island have a Facebook page," Brown says. "I didn't know about it. Somebody posted it on there with a message like, 'Everybody needs to write in and comment and call this guy names,' and boy, they sure did."
He received dozens of messages and somebody egged his house.
An administrator of Rock Island's backyard chicken Facebook page says she published the article and asked people to write comments on the issue, but she apologizes for anyone who took it further by badmouthing Brown and egging his home.
In the column, Brown describes his image of chicken owners, which offended some readers: hipsters visiting microbreweries, wearing ironic t-shirts, and watching Game of Thrones. And he shares his preference for seeing chickens, well, ready to be cooked and eaten, not exactly walking freely in the backyard.
He also says chickens are noisy and messy, and he doesn't want them within view of his home.
"But honestly I did not mean to make this into a giant brouhaha in the slightest and I don't have any passionate anti-chicken feelings," Brown says.
But chicken lovers who are either fighting for ordinances to allow backyard chickens or who already keep them are passionate about the cause.
Liz Smith lives in Moline. She and her friend Mary Petersen were advocates for the ordinance there and did research to address some common concerns. Smith says the biggest concerns were noise and predators.
"The roosters are noisy, but most city ordinances don't allow roosters," Smith says. "Another one was predators. They were concerned it would increase the population of raccoons, foxes, even things like squirrels and rats. But in a properly enclosed coop, you're not really going to have those problems."
Smith has three children and runs a daycare at her home, and says the kids love the chickens.
"The first thing they do when we come outside in the morning is they run over to the chicken coop and start banging on the cage and saying, 'bawk-bawks, bawk-bawks,'" she says. "They love the chickens."
And Petersen says that by raising chickens at home, her family can see where their food comes from.
"I just really like the idea of them knowing that food isn't magically at store — food comes from somewhere," she says. "The local foods movement, lowering your carbon footprint, all of these things are super important to me and that's what I want to teach my family."
Across the river, Julie Schmidt-Urban and Mike Angelos launched a group called "Backyard Chickens-Scott County" on the website Meetup. They're asking for signatures on a petitionto show the City Council.
Schmidt-Urban is a recent convert. She hadn't been around birds much until she worked on a community farming project in Carbon Cliff in 2013.
"Frankly, new to birds, they were a little creepy. They come right up, they're like dinosaurs with wings," Schmidt-Urban says. "But within a very short period of time, probably within a week or so, I started to really appreciate what they were doing — the bugs they ate, the weeds they took care of."
She says people who don't have direct experience with the fowl are missing the point.
"We're not talking about raising chickens for chicken fighting or even for butchering," she says. "We're talking about very small flocks that prove to children in the family where their food comes from, how to treat animals kindly and respectfully."
Angelos says they're working to change the Davenport ordinance, which prohibits chickens except in agricultural zones. They started the conversation at a City Council work session last week.
"Most of the councilmen thought it was a good idea and the mayor said let's go ahead with this and we'll have the staff do some research on this," Angelos says. "We do have two aldermen who can get it on the agenda, so it will go to a vote at some point."
Schmidt-Urban and Angelos have a table at the Freight House Farmers Market in Davenport where they answer people's questions and drum up support for the ordinance. They have talked with Davenport Alderman at-large Kyle Gripp, who says requests to allow chickens came up a lot during his recent campaign.
"It certainly wasn't something that was on my platform when I was running, and you can put me in the category of I'm not going to have backyard chickens, but I don't mind if my neighbors do," Gripp says. "For those people who really want to do this and live a sustainable and ecological-friendly life within a city, it's very important to them and they need to be represented as well."
Davenport's 4th ward alderman Ray Ambrose expressed some concern over the ordinance at the work session.
"I hear so many neighborhood complaints and if we get into this, all I see is another issue that staff and the police department is going to have to address."
"I hear so many neighborhood complaints and if we get into this, all I see is another issue that staff and the police department is going to have to address," Ambrose says.
But, he says, if the council can present a compelling ordinance, he won't stand in the way.
And as for columnist Shane Brown? Amid the backlash from his first column, he received an invitation from a woman who has backyard chickens.
"She wrote me and said come meet my chickens," Brown says. "As far as backyard hens go, they're absolutely delightful. Did they stink? Not especially. Were they noisy? Not especially."
He has since pleaded for a truce in his column and says as long as there is a limit to the number of hens — and roosters and slaughtering are not allowed — he wouldn't mind chickens in Rock Island.
Both Davenport and Rock Island city councils are researching ordinances in other cities. Backyard chickens are already allowed in most major cities in Iowa and Illinois.