DAVIS, Calif.

BEVERLY HILLS has its Garden Tour; the Hamptons, its Designer Showhouse.

Yet for sheer visual pluck, nothing surpasses the trellised residence of Boss Lady, a Silver Laced Wyandotte chicken, set amid formal boxwood hedges beneath a fig tree from which ripe fruit drop like bonbons.

The coop, in Ann M. Evans’s backyard, was one of 18 stops on the 16-mile Tour de Cluck at the beginning of this year’s season of chicken coop tours , which ends this weekend. The tour, a biking expedition complete with “coop docents,” included about 700 chicken keepers, wannabes and looky-loos who pondered the increasingly intense relationship among kitchen, coop and garden.

“They have a little bit of terroir in their eggs,” Ms. Evans, a former mayor who helped found this city’s farmers’ market, said of her “girls,” as most chicken keepers insist on calling their birds. “They make me feel like I’m living on a self-sufficient farm even in my suburban community.”

The Tour de Cluck, which attracted legions of coop jocks in bike helmets, some in zany chicken fashion statements, is part of a boomlet in chicken voyeurism, including tours this summer in Seattle; Salem, Ore.; and Santa Fe, N.M.