Where did the Ybor City chickens come from? Your rooster questions, answered.

YBOR CITY — Hillsborough County’s most beloved residents love to shriek in the streets.

They burrow their beaks in the dirt of local parks, parade with hearty clucks across the brick roads and peck at slices of pizza left on the sidewalk. They are not phased by the rowdy humans who gather here in their costumes and drunken states. For the wild chickens of Ybor, this is their city.

“They’re smarter than us, because they know after sunset, you might want to hide in a tree,” said Dylan Breese, founder of the Ybor Chickens Society and the Ybor Misfits Microsanctuary. “They know when the crazies are going to come out and they put themselves to bed.”

The birds are protected by Tampa ordinance and the love of local residents. But while the Ybor chickens are now memorialized in sculptures and T-shirts and tattoos, they weren’t always cherished.

How did it come to be this way? And where did the tradition of feral fowl come from?

We’re answering your rooster questions in this edition of Florida Wonders, a periodic series exploring readers’ queries about Tampa Bay. Have a burning question about your neighborhood? Fill out this form or email your inquiries to floridawonders@tampabay.com.

Where’d those Ybor chickens come from?

Historians believe the avian tradition took off in the 1880s, when the first cigar workers came to the area from Cuba, Italy and Spain.

As factory workers moved from boarding houses to single-family homes in Ybor City and West Tampa, keeping chickens in their yards would have been a common occurrence, said Rodney Kite-Powell.

“Certainly they weren’t running around to the degree they are now,” he said, noting there were more predators in that era, from alligators in the swampy southern portion of Ybor to feral dogs and pigs. While some chickens may have been free to roam, Kite-Powell said others would have been penned up at home for safety.

Historians speculate that some of the chickens that roam the city today may be descendants of these early birds, though many other new ones have been brought to the area since then. It’s tough to guess how large that early chicken population would have been.

“I don’t think they would have documented chickens early on, because they would have been everywhere,” Kite-Powell said. “It would be like saying, ‘I saw a car today.’”

The Tampa Bay History Center does have evidence of cigar companies using roosters in their iconography. Notable brands Tampa Fad and El Gallo did this from the early 1900s through the 1920s.

“Cockfighting was really big,” Kite-Powell said. “Roosters were kind of considered masculine creatures.”

He pointed out that in the museum’s current ‘Invisible Immigrants’ exhibit, there is home video footage from 1938 featuring yard hens in West Tampa.

Kite-Powell, who grew up visiting Ybor on field trips in the early to mid 1980s, said he saw far fewer birds back then compared to today.

There are Tampeños out there who don’t believe the birds have been here that long, noted Breese, who occasionally sees social media comments from rooster truthers.

“Some commenters say ‘There were never chickens in Ybor City!’” Breese said. “And others say ‘They were literally always in my mother’s yard.’”

Kite-Powell believes this could be because of the way Interstate 4 sliced through Ybor when it was constructed, dividing up the area’s commercial and residential areas.

“The bulk of residents in Ybor would have been north of the interstate, and so if there’s chickens to be had, they probably would go there,” he said. “The question really is, are they ancestral chickens, or are they modern chickens?”

No one knows for sure. But Cephas Gilbert, who ran Cephas’ Hot Shop Jamaican restaurant in Ybor City for nearly 40 years, ​​had some ideas.

According to Times archives, a hurricane in 1993 blew open the chicken coop he had across the street from the restaurant. When the storm passed, all of his birds had disappeared.

“Rather than griping about losing his source of fresh eggs, Gilbert let the birds remain at large,” reads a 2019 Times story. “Many of today’s Ybor chickens, he claims, are descendants of those.”

How did the chickens become a mascot for Ybor City?

These days, Ybor’s roosters are just as much a symbol of the city as Cuban bread and cigars. When asked how this came to be, many locals point to Tommy Stephens, a.k.a. the “Chicken Man.”

He first encountered the birds soon after purchasing a home in Ybor in the 1980s. He remembers his neighbor’s property always having roosters on it.

“Being a country boy, I bought some corn and I started feeding them,” Stephens said. “Next thing I know, they’re coming into my yard all the time, and I felt like I was stealing the man’s chickens. So I talked to some people that had chickens, and they brought me a rooster and two hens.”

One day in 1997, James the rooster didn’t come home. Stephens went out looking for him and found a little bird body on the railroad tracks. He buried James, saving his tail feathers.

Stephens went to a local watering hole to nurse his broken heart, and his friends laughed at him. He was still mad about it the next day, when he returned to tell them off.

“You know, you bastards laughed at me last night about my rooster getting killed,” Stephens told them. “I want to have a party. We’re going to have a funeral for him.”

About 75 people joined Stephens in a New Orleans-style funeral march down Seventh Avenue.

The rooster funeral parade became an annual tradition, growing bigger each year and featuring local krewes dressed in color-coordinated costumes. Stephens led the march, wearing a tuxedo purchased from La France Vintage Clothing and a feathered top hat. The parade always concluded with a party in his front yard.

Another time, he printed up hundreds of invitations and mailed them out. He called a local funeral home and asked to rent a driver and a hearse. He planned to place a tiny casket in the back.

“I was gonna pay them people $250 until they found out it was for (a chicken),” he said.

When a friend brought Stephens a golf cart, he made his own hearse for the casket, customized with black carpet and curtains.

“It was a hell of a run,” he said, noting that newspaper stories about the festivities ran as far away as Alabama. “I got famous for it, honey, over a damn chicken.”

His backyard also became a local bird graveyard. That’s where he buried friends like Chicken Nugget, who used to sip beer out of a bottle cap. Stephens was pleased to sell his property to folks who agreed to keep the burial ground intact.

Stephens, 80, lives in North Florida, where his neighbors have yard birds.

“The reason I’m so damn healthy,” he said, “is because I eat plenty of chicken.”

Who looks out for the Ybor chickens now?

The chickens that roam Ybor are wild animals, and quite resilient ones at that. But when one is in trouble, Breese, who started the Ybor Misfits Microsanctuary nonprofit, steps in.

For nine years, he’s looked out for the city’s orphaned and injured hens, roosters and chicks.

Breese has been known to drive around with collapsible nets and snake cameras to see down storm drains. He uses a tricked-out vacuum to gently suck up chicks wedged in strange places.

Breese also started the Ybor Chickens Society, which advocates for the birds in city council meetings and celebrates acts of kindness toward the local flock.

The efforts are run by a small team of volunteers — just Breese, his sister and his fiance. But there’s a lot of work to be done, at “all kinds of weird hours.”

“For absolutely everything,” he said. “Like ‘This chicken has a limp. It sneezed, it farted, it looks sad. This chicken is lonely.’ I’m not sure what to do in those cases. But hopefully people realize that we’re here if they’re in a situation that they can’t get out of on their own.”

It started on Easter morning in 2016, when Breese found a cute hen and her babies living near his home. He started looking after the little group, and documenting them on Instagram.

“Before long, the page had 1,000 followers, and so I generically named it ‘Ybor Chickens’ instead of something more specific,” he said. “So the community turned it into something I wasn’t prepared for … From that point, anytime something went wrong with a chicken in Ybor, we were the ones people were reaching out to.”

Breese has since taken online courses on chicken welfare through the University of Edinburgh and Oklahoma State University. He gets calls from folks across Ybor, from concerned residents to the city’s police, parking, code and mobility departments.

The most vulnerable birds, from the one-legged to the blind, become permanent residents of the rescue.

Ybor City’s chicken population is a fraction of the size of Key West’s — in the hundreds, rather than the thousands. No one knows for sure exactly how many of the birds roam our local streets.

People are not always kind to the chickens.

According to Times archives, “the chickens of Ybor are protected by a decades-old Tampa ordinance declaring the entire city a bird sanctuary in which it is unlawful to ‘hunt, kill, maim or trap … or otherwise molest’ birds. The law does not apply to ‘birds or fowl raised in captivity for human consumption.‘”

It’s also illegal to abandon animals, including chickens. This, unfortunately, does not stop people from dumping their birds in Ybor.

“The feral ones have a territory, and the natural thing for them to do is to protect their territory,” Breese said. “There’s only so much food in that area. There are only so many hens in that area. So if they see an outsider, they are going to try to eliminate it.”

Here’s what Breese wants you to know: If you see a wild chicken, don’t feed it. If you get chicks for Easter, don’t bring them to Ybor thinking the tough local ones will take them under their wings. And if you want to get up close and personal with an Ybor bird in a safe environment, grab your mat and come to Chicken Yoga.

The monthly fundraiser for the Ybor Misfits Microsanctuary is hosted at Hotel Haya (visit hotelhaya.com to book). It features some of the friendly birds at the rescue.

Don’t worry — you won’t get pooped on. Breese outfits the birds with chicken diapers from Etsy. And each gets a bath before class starts.

When Breese is not volunteering for the rescue, he works in higher education leadership and is the executive director for the Ybor City Saturday Market. While it’s not a requirement to stock items repping the roosters, “a good 30 to 40% of the people there have some type of chicken merch,” from cookies to jewelry.

Perhaps the most famous shirt he sees comes from local vendor Hogan Made, showing a rooster smoking a cigar.

“That shirt’s made it to Mexico, Italy, Kenya, all over the place,” he said. “A lot of people who are just visiting here and happen upon the market will want to buy something with a chicken on it to take home as a souvenir.”

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