New York, NY —

Here’s something you don’t expect to hear in Brooklyn: the sound of a chicken. Clucking.

The sound may be out of the ordinary for New York City, but the sentiment is not. This clucking chicken is complaining. Greg Anderson translates.

“She’s trying to convince one of the other chickens to get up off the eggs so she can sit on them.”

Anderson and his wife, Debbie, share the tasks of raising six hens with other members of the North Bergen Community Garden in Crown Heights. Every morning, the Andersons feed and water the hens, and check the coop for their reward: fresh eggs.

Greg walks into the coop, situated in the back of the large garden.

“Ah, let’s see. Well, they’re sitting. This is Onyx.” Anderson gestures toward a black hen sitting in a small wooden nesting box built into the wall of the coop. The noisy one watches attentively nearby.

“Hey, ladies,” Anderson calls out. He nudges aside Onyx. “We have two [eggs]. Two pretty big ones. A white one, and a brown one.”

The eggs are warm to the touch. Debbie Anderson says they taste better, and are more satisfying, than supermarket eggs.

“I think what we get out of it -- what I get out of it -– is a connection to where my food comes from. It's very nourishing,” she says.

There is a new chicken-keeping movement in America, spurred by an interest in local, humanely treated, sustainable food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t keep statistics on such small-scale farming, but it says anecdotal evidence suggests a growing number of people raising chickens in suburban and urban areas. There are dozens of chicken websites offering advice and support for beginning urban farmers. One popular site, Backyard Chickens, says the online forum it started in 2007 with 50 members now boasts more than 60,000. And top online supplier McMurray Hatchery says small orders are on the rise. It says it's grown 10 percent annually since 2007, and it has struggled to keep up with demand.

What's the draw? Unlike cattle or pigs, chickens are manageable for city dwellers. They're cheap -- $2.50 for a day-old peep, mailed to your door, or $13 for a teenage chicken, called a pullet. They don't require a lot of space. Their coops can be made out of old dressers or scrap lumber. Their feed can be expensive, but they also eat backyard bugs and kitchen scraps. And they give something back -- an egg a day, sometimes, when a hen is in her prime.

But most urban chicken keepers are doing it for other reasons than trying to save money on pricey, free-range eggs.

Bee Ayer manages BK Farmyards, a 50-bird operation based in the Imani Community Garden in Crown Heights.

“It really isn't a moneymaking venture,” Ayer says. “We are breaking even because we have very low costs, because we are capturing food from the waste stream. But it really is about education and experimentation in creating a local food system.”

Many cities' public health and zoning ordinances don't allow chickens. In the Northeast, that's true in Boston, Albany, Providence and Hartford. Meanwhile, chicken bans were lifted last year in New Haven, Conn., and Portland, Me., due to demand from would-be backyard farmers.

Here, roosters are illegal, because of their crowing. But New Yorkers can raise as many hens as they want, as long as they don't stink, make too much noise or attract flies and other pests.

Megan Paska rents an apartment in a three-story row house in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. She was able to convince her landlady to let her keep four hens in an old doghouse out back.

“I had already been doing gardening and composting,” says Paska, as she surveyed several raised beds and a compost heap in the corner of the yard. “You don't need a whole lot of space for it. We’ve got a yard. The chicken manure can go in the compost bin and make our garden grow really well.”

She pauses.

“It completed the trifecta.”

Chickens may be newly hip, but they’re old school in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. In the Crotona neighborhood of the South Bronx, Karen Washington says the flock in her community garden, Garden of Happiness, got its start ten years ago, when someone dropped off several chicks.

“We city folk didn’t know anything about raising chickens,” she says, surveying her 11 hens. “So a lot of the members who were from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic or down South, they said, ‘You know what? I know how to take care of chickens.’”

Caring for chickens isn't care free. The birds can carry the bad bacteria, Salmonella. Federal health officials suggest common sense precautions such as hand-washing. There are predators to watch out for, such as stray cats and raccoons. And chickens can’t get too wet or too cold. Greg Anderson sat in the coop with a hen under his coat one winter to warm her up. He didn’t mind.

“I love it. I love it," he says. "I’m a misplaced country boy, and I think I’ve found my place.”