#wild rooster

the story, as it happened:

we were driving back home from steak n shake, around midnight, when we saw what looked like a paper bag with a black trash bag with a red drawstring inside it in the right turn lane. i thought it was just moving in the wind until the bag suddenly stepped out into the lane, and revealed itself to be a chicken.

now, i live in a part of south florida that while it does have farms, this was the less rural sector of davie, right near where a lot of college campuses are. it’s very uncommon to see chickens down here. i’ve never seen in one in this area. so i’m flabbergasted, and jess, who’s used to central florida, is pretty much unaffected.

cue a lot of screaming from me about what a chicken is doing on the side of the road at midnight in south florida. i start thinking about what’s gonna happen to the poor thing since it’s at a busy intersection, and the drivers here suck.

i make the decision that the morally correct choice of action is to turn around and go catch the bugger.

so we pull into the CVS at the corner we saw him at, get out of the car, and start trying to approach him. he’s scared and clucking up a storm, and then bolts across the street. i take off my sweatshirt and jess and i follow him over to the canal across the way, whereupon he takes a dive into the water. jess, being a wild child, goes down the very steep side, wades into the water, and makes several attempts to snag him.

against all odds, they succeed.

we walk him back to the car, soaking wet and shaking. we get a clean towel from the CVS (and ask about animal control, probably making several people’s nights upon walking into a CVS holding a wet rooster), dry the poor thing off, and inspect him. he’s pretty much all right, looked to be fairly young since he still had spines on some of his feathers.

we decide to call him newt, as he is a fantastic beast and we found him.

i start calling various places hoping to get information about animal control, but it’s midnight and no one is responding. we pretty much have to take him home for the night (along with a long stop at wal-mart to get a dog crate to transport him in). at home, he’s chill. we feed him some of jess’s bird’s birdseed, get him some water, and a nice place to rest. he’s inquisitive and friendly, loafs when pet, and is just an all-around wonderful lil boi.

the next day (today), after dropping jess off at the train station, i start going around davie looking for places that might accept a rooster. the guys at the bergeron rodeo grounds suggested going to an animal feed place and seeing if any of the customers want to take him in. (one of the guys really wanted to take him and kept cooing about what a good boy he was, which was honestly adorable af, but he already had two roosters and they fought fairly frequently.)

i get exceptionally lucky and there’s a lady downtown who pretty much specializes in taking in abandoned livestock, since it turns out that in this part of florida, animal control only deals with cats and dogs, and the sheriffs who deal with livestock don’t consider chickens to be livestock, so they fall in this weird gray area of exotic animals (you’re apparently not even legally allowed to own a chicken in this area).

so i drive down to her barn and we get to talking. i tell her the story, she looks heartbroken for the poor fella. she takes him out of the crate and inspects him. despite being uninjured, tame, and otherwise in decent health, newt was a little underweight, and what would normally be long, beautiful green tailfeathers (he was a rhode island red, the kind on the kellogg’s cereal box if you’re unfamiliar) were chopped off. what we thought was a beak deformity was actually something that these places that sell chicks do to chickens, cutting off part of the top so they don’t bite or peck.

she’s gonna give him a good shot at life, and i’m happy he got a second chance. all in all i’m very thankful we were able to catch the guy, since i thought he was gonna get creamed by a car or drown in the canal once he’d jumped in there.