CHICAGO (McClatchy) — Accompanied by her “director of security,” a Victorian bulldog called Biff, Mo Cahill opened the back door of a baby-blue truck she keeps in her backyard as a makeshift chicken coop.

Out streamed galline citizens of Moah’s Ark, a small urban farm in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. Cahill, 62, has about two dozen chickens and three roosters, who mostly live in the 1993 Chevy suburban or a smaller coop on a plot she owns two lots over.

One chicken, which Cahill said resembled a queen, was named Cleo. Others, like Fat Tony, Elena and Sonia, are named after Supreme Court justices. The fowl drink from a tire converted into a water bowl.

“I ate my beloved Whitey Bulger,” Cahill said later, when asked whether she will consume named chickens. “I love them, but they’re still chickens. This whole thing is still about food.”

Cahill, who has white-silver hair and wore overalls while tending to her birds, sometimes jokingly refers to herself as a “crazy chicken lady.” She says it in good humor, but some of her neighbors aren’t amused by the farm.

Moah’s Ark has drawn criticism from the city and other community members. Neighbors have complained about chickens running wild, and the city once served her with more than two dozen property violations, including allegations that the farm has drawn rats, which she disputed.

But the issue that “really gets people’s blood boiling is the roosters” and their crowing, said Alderman Joe Moore, 49th District.

“The peace and quiet the neighbors should be entitled to, particularly in the evening hours, should be respected,” Moore said.

Cahill has lived on Touhy for 30 years, she said, and spent much of her life as a full-time mom. She has five children and got divorced for a second time in 2015.

At one point, Cahill wanted to be a doctor to make her father happy. She’s worked in labs, as a carpenter and as an artist, she said. Cahill said she identifies as a “staunch feminist” and is highly engaged in politics.

“I can walk into a room with 10 strangers and walk out with seven new best friends, two (people) scratching their heads and saying ‘What the (expletive),’ and one person will go home to sharpen their knives,” Cahill said.

About five years ago, Cahill bought a vacant property on her block to grow tomatoes and plant apple trees. She didn’t plan to start a farm but she began learning about urban agriculture and, “having always been a sucker for a great idea, off I went.”

At Moah’s Ark, Cahill has planted berries, heirloom tomatoes, “weapons-grade hot peppers” and over a dozen fruit trees, she said. Most of the chickens stay in her backyard coop while the plants grow on the once-vacant lot.

On her farm, Cahill employs somewhat obscure agriculture techniques, including hugelkultur, a soil building technique she said “basically uses landscape waste to build soil.” As part of that, Cahill has buried numerous mature trees on the property that were chopped up into pieces and put together like a compost pile.

Those have drawn criticism too, from people who thought she was dumping waste. In the countryside, agriculture is a way of life, but urbanites who bring farms into the city run into tensions from people who sometimes dismiss them as quirky or worse.

Moore said he supports urban agriculture but draws a line at roosters in the city.

“She can have a farm. Raise her vegetables. Maintain her chickens,” Moore said. “But try to be a little bit more of a good neighbor and recognize she’s not in the middle of Iowa. She’s in the middle of Rogers Park in Chicago.”

Cahill said she has “a huge number of fans” and “a few enemies.”

“That’s the song most urban farmers will sing,” she said.

The problems took a new turn in March 2016, when a neighbor called 911 out of what she called “desperation,” a transcript of a subsequent court hearing shows. Three police officers responded and gave Cahill citations for excessive noise and keeping loose chickens.

At a June 2016 administrative hearing on the tickets, one neighbor testified that she called Animal Care and Control because the rooster “was crowing all night long (and) we were being woken up all night long.” The noise would start early in the day, a different neighbor said, “and we could hear them in our homes with windows closed.”

A judge ruled against Cahill at that hearing and upheld the tickets, costing her $450 in fines.

But Cahill decided to fight what her lawyer called the “rooster case” decision and appealed. This week, she appeared in a downtown courtroom and a judge tossed the loose chickens violation but upheld the excessive noise complaint. Cahill said the split decision is “better than nothing.”

Cahill said she’s surprised by the clamor her farm has raised.

“I feel like I’m ringing a primal bell for some people,” Cahill said.

Over the years, Cahill said she’s tried to address the neighbors’ complaints. She said she’s added soundproofing, moved the coop farther from the alley to lessen noise traveling, and changed the birds’ breeding and hatching schedule so it happens before most people start opening their windows.

But some of the complaints she’s received, Cahill said, are overblown or untrue, like the rats complaint. In a Facebook post, Cahill said someone complained that her front-end loader used for picking up heavy things “ran all day, every day.”

“How can I prove this is false? Because it has spent more time broken down than running,” she wrote. “Last year, it spent almost the entire year in the shop.”

When she started out, Cahill said, she “never would’ve guessed” how many enemies the farm would make. She said she’s been “disappointed” in Moore, her alderman; she said he could’ve been more supportive.

Moore said he’s tried to mediate but found Cahill defensive and unwilling to address some of the concerns. Recently, though, Moore said he hasn’t heard complaints.

“In my line of work, no news is good news,” Moore said.

After the hearing, Cahill went home, turned on the sprinklers and fed the chickens. She said she cracked open “a cold one” and settled down for her nightly politics fix with “the folks” at MSNBC.

“I’m a lucky woman,” Cahill said. “I have been able to pursue a lot of dreams and this is a great one for my old age.”