They've survived hurricanes, hawks, pellet guns, poison, politicians and naughty boys. But now, after ranging free for more than 50 years, the chickens of Key West may finally have met an enemy they can't outsmart: avian flu paranoia.

Bill Verge, a city commissioner of Key West, a South Florida town (population 25,000) whose main economy is tourism, says he will propose an ordinance in the next few weeks requiring that all chickens roaming free on public land -- roughly 2,000 of them -- be trapped and shipped to a farm out of town. If people want to keep chickens in their backyards, they will have to be in pens. Key West is on migratory bird routes, Mr. Verge argues, and migratory birds can infect domestic poultry with the H5N1 strain of avian flu.

"One outbreak, and you can forget tourism down here," he says. "It would be over." The chicken population, largely unchecked by natural predators, has been steadily growing on the tiny two-mile-by-four-mile island. "Key West is a town, not a barnyard," says Mark Rossi, another commissioner who supports getting rid of the chickens. "I don't want to do this, but I'm charged by the public to look out for (its) health and well-being." Mr. Rossi says he believes the seven-member city commission will pass the ordinance.

If any topic consistently sends Key West residents to the barricades, it's their chickens. Like many other Southern towns -- and even Miami -- Key West has traditionally turned a blind eye to residents keeping chickens in their backyards.

Before supermarkets came to rural areas in the mid-20th century, many people raised poultry for meat and eggs. Key West also has a large Cuban population, some of whom brought with them their zeal for cockfighting. Aggressive roosters were bred for Sunday afternoon fights; in the 1930s, Key West resident Ernest Hemingway was said to be a frequent -- and frequently unsuccessfully -- gambler on the fights.

But beginning about midcentury, prepackaged chicken arrived, and cockfighting was outlawed. With no incentive to feed and house their fowl, many owners let them loose to survive by pecking for food near the post office, in the cemetery and around outdoor restaurants. As chickens elsewhere in the U.S. became an oddity, Key West's chickens became a tourist attraction.

"I don't know what it is about chickens people love so much," says Linda O'Brien, owner of the Market Share Co., a local marketing firm. "But I often see people taking pictures of them. When the sun hits the front of the bird, it's a piece of art, and you can't buy art like that."

Other people think the chickens are at least a nuisance, at worst a genuine threat to people's health, regardless of avian flu. "Their droppings go in the water, they're around playgrounds, the health department has declared them a hazard," says John Jones, assistant city manager. "And they breed fast. A chicken will lay a dozen eggs, and they'll hatch in 29 days."

But ridding Key West of its chickens, says Katha Sheehan, the birds' most tenacious champion, is "the third rail of Key West politics." Indeed, beginning as early as 1949, the city has tried to regulate its chickens, first by requiring permits, then trying to prohibit the birds outright. But the rules were widely flouted. Public sentiment is so pro-chicken that, today, ordinances prohibit "luring, enticing, seizing, molesting or teasing an animal."

Yet plenty of Key West residents would raise their sundown margaritas to the end of the chickens. Even Ms. Sheehan concedes that some people hate them. "People call me to complain, and say, 'That rooster is laughing at me'," she says. "They take the noise very personally."

Joan Langley, a fourth-generation Key West resident, fondly remembers the era when little boys had BB guns "and sometimes birds would happen to get in the way." A former city commissioner once shot a chicken with a pellet gun, and a neighbor called the police. "It was not cruelty to animals," the shooter reportedly protested. "It was a nice clean head shot."

Two years ago, the city hired a chicken catcher and promised him $20 for each chicken he could trap, up to about 1,000 chickens. The program did not go well. Chicken sympathizers kept the birds well fed and opened any traps that were triggered. After catching only a few hundred chickens, the chicken catcher was let go.

But that was before the H5N1 virus began turning the world's chickens into potentially lethal weapons. Although the virus hasn't been identified in any birds in the U.S. yet, Key West officials anxiously monitored reports earlier this month of a cluster of dead birds in the Bahamas; tourist officials there quickly played down what they called an "exaggerated" story.

Both Florida and federal health officials recommend keeping an eye on roaming chickens. If officials do see the flu in migratory birds, says David Daigle, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, "you would want to move domestic chickens" into pens.

The risk to human health from chickens running around is "minimal," says John Carey, associate department head of poultry science at Texas A & M University in College Station. "But perception is 90 percent of the game. If people stay away from a resort community because of the birds, that's a whole other matter."

But if migratory birds are the ones carrying avian flu, some chicken supporters ask, why pick on the chickens? "There's nothing the citizens of Key West can do to control the populations of seagulls or pelicans," says Mr. Verge. "We can only control the birds we can control. The rest is nature. And I guarantee you, if there's an outbreak of avian flu in, say, Georgia, the people of Key West will be saying, 'Get rid of the chickens!"'