A wild "chicken" chase

I don't know what it is about our front flowerbed, but I do know it is the source of a lot of interesting stories. This one definitely tops the cat story.

I was pulling into the driveway this morning with Katie and Nicholas and Dunkin' Donuts in tow. My eyes were instantly drawn to a bird under the bird feeder. This was not a cardinal, nor a dove or even a crow. This bird was HUGE and it was plucking away at birdseed with a squirrel right next to it.

We all sat in total amazement staring at the strange bird, not a word coming from our mouths. When we finally opened the car doors, I thought the bird would fly off, but it just stood there unfazed. We got out of the car and just stood there, too. Pete finally came out to see if we had gone crazy, and I pointed frantically to the bushes and whispered "LOOK," my finger waving nonstop. By that time the bird, or CHICKEN as I soon found out (I thought it was a rooster) was waddling to the next yard.

Pete stopped and talked to a neighbor who was staring at the chicken, too. He said others had spotted the bird roaming the neighborhood lately. Sam's theory is that the bird is a Mardi Gras chicken to be caught and made into gumbo. Nicholas wanted to catch and shoot it so we could have chicken for dinner.

By the time I had my camera, Mr. Chicken was long gone, which I told Pete was good because I had never gotten so close to a real chicken before and that I was a little "chicken" about the whole thing. Plus, I did not want to go on a wild CHICKEN chase. Pete got in his car to try and find the chicken so he could take a picture for me, but he had no luck either. So if you find a chicken running around town completely lost, it probably is.

But Pete did share a chicken story with me. His father and step-mother lived in a house in New York next to a fraternity house. One morning, Joan woke up and found a baby chicken in their front yard. They ended up turning this chicken into a pet and kept it for years (in a cage in the backyard). They later found out that the fraternity had had a scavenger hunt the night before the baby chicken was found, and one of the items was a farm animal. Either nobody found the chicken, or they just decided not to keep it.

I'm not sure I could eat a chicken I found in my yard, but I know I couldn't keep it as a pet either. The dogs would go crazy...