Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to the side zoned Residential Agricultural.

If you get that admittedly fowl joke, you’ve been following the debate about where one can raise chickens locally. While a Savannah ordinance allows up to five hens on a residential lot, the backyard birds were prohibited in all but properties zoned residential agricultural — or RA — in unincorporated Chatham County. The issue spun up over the summer, included celebrity Chef Paula Deen’s being cited for a zoning violation over her beloved rescue hens, and eventually was sent to a task force at the Savannah-Chatham County Metropolitan Planning Commission for sorting out.

That task force, composed of volunteers from various city and county departments as well as interested citizens, met Friday to discuss the progress it had made in hashing out not just countywide rules for chickens, but also for bees and other animals.

Backyard chicken lovers and beekeepers are likely to be pleased with what they’ve come up with so far.

They’re proposing that beekeepers be allowed to keep their hives in limited numbers based on lot size and to abide by certain practices that keep bees from becoming a nuisance, such as providing water to keep them from congregating at

a local swimming pool. Beekeepers would also register their hives. That’s a big improvement for beekeepers in the city, where hives are officially verboten.

Task force member Greg Stewart, president of the 54-member Coastal Empire Beekeepers Association, said he agreed with the notion of registration, which will allow Animal Control to better respond to calls about nuisance bees.

“When they get calls, they can look it up and say those bees are legal,” he said.

He suggested a few tweaks to the requirements to reduce the proposed $25 per location cost for beekeepers.

He also agreed that the number of hives needs to be limited based on lot size. Saturating an area with bees makes them compete for limited resources.

“There could be a fountain that becomes the Atlanta airport of bees,” he said.

For chickens, two issues have been most contentious: How many can be kept and whether roosters would be allowed. The draft ordinance produced so far suggests one hen per 1,000 square feet of lot size.

The MPC’s Dennis Hutton said he worked through many complicated formulas before coming up with this streamlined one.

“I know if I have an 8,000-square-foot lot I can have eight chickens,” he said. “It works 97 percent of the time.”

Roosters remain a sticking point.

“I hate the sound of a rooster,” said task force member Pamela Oglesby. “That’s very annoying for somebody who doesn’t want to hear it.”

At the meeting’s start, the draft read “Roosters are not permitted.”

But that had chicken lovers like Freya Zipperer crowing about well, the birds and the bees.

“How are we going to continue the species if we don’t have roosters?” she asked. “Are we going to rent a rooster?”

Zipperer lives on a big lot off Norwood Avenue where she keeps hens and two showy roosters named Sultan and Pollo.

Task force chairwoman Blake Caldwell, a retired CDC epidemiologist who was raised on a farm and volunteered out of personal interest to guide the task force, is worried that roosters could be a deal killer once the ordinance gets to city council and the county commission, who ultimately must pass it. For now, it looks like roosters might get included with other noisy birds such as peafowl and ducks, which would require larger lots.

“There are a lot of roosters living in the county without complaint,” Caldwell said. “The task force is struggling with how to make it fair for people who don’t like roosters.”