Tour organizer Michelle Old of Duke Park put the word out for interested coop-owners on some neighborhood email lists last week, and while she says arrangements are just now getting under way the date is most likely in October and the beneficiary will be Well Baby Durham, a worthy enterprise.

Scoffers may sneer at and witlings defame, to borrow some phrasing from our state song, but this is for real. And why not? Durham has plenty of people-home tours and you'll pay the same $26 for the permit to occupy a house as you will for a permit to raise backyard chickens. (And it's more creative than the "Dog Olympics" they're having in Raleigh this Saturday.)

Seriously, chickens are a big deal in Durham. Organizer Old, as a matter of fact, runs a chicken-sitting business, Purple Roost, to mind your birds when you go out of town.

The opportunity niche for such a service resulted from a grassroots movement a couple years ago: a genuine groundswell of citizen sentiment for the Bull City to change the law and let people have chickens in their backyards. When it came time for the City Council to make a decision, its meeting chamber was packed with people like it hadn't been since back in 1999 when Citizens Against Urban Sprawl Everywhere brought 450 or so to fight against Southpoint mall.

That turnout did not have the desired effect, but when the chicken question came up a decade later the citizens overcame the skepticism of old chicken hands, among them Councilman Howard Clement and Mayor Bill Bell, who knew from first-hand childhood experience what comes with, and from, keeping chickens.

(Bell: I had to clean the chicken coop, and I know how much they do.

(Clement: Not pleasant.)

Chickens were approved in a 7-0 vote, but it didn't come easy - the council continued the case twice to have time to think about it and to have city staff look into all the combinations and permutations backyard cooping could imply. In the end, all was well, though setting up in chicken keeping is not as simple as you might think.

You have to let the neighbors know what you intend and if any raise objections City Hall gets to intervene; you have to get a "limited agricultural permit" and maybe a building permit if your planned coop is big enough; and there are specifications for the quarters your chickens will be living in. This is Durham, after all, and we do have standards for housing. For chickens, anyway.

So we're not talking about any old chicken house tossed together with some leftover screening and tobacco sticks, and this being Durham we can be confident our creative class has come up with some coops worth looking at, and credit to the inventive Michelle Old for coming up with the idea.

If anybody's giving out awards for Durham Grit these days, she ought to get one, and that's not just chicken feed.