BOB KORNEGAY: Just a few ‘fowl’ thoughts

My friend Pat and I don’t get together often, but when we do it’s comforting. I’m an avid birder and Pat enjoys keeping and tending chickens. These pursuits are considered weird by some, and it’s quite refreshing to carry on a conversation with one who thinks otherwise, be the subject Rhode Island reds or the rare sighting of a migrating dickcissel.

As a birder, of course, I am not allowed to add domestic poultry to my life list, but chickens have always appealed to me. Chickens and I have a history.

As a child, I went through my share of the traditional Easter “biddies,” baby chicks once presented to youngsters as cute holiday gifts. They lived for a time in a cardboard box by the stove.

Cute as they were, Easter biddies had their drawbacks. For example, an Easter biddy did not deem it necessary to hop down from one’s lap to relieve itself. When it had to go, it went. All over whatever I was wearing at the time, including my new Easter suit.

While this didn’t much bother me, Mama was quite another story. She was very upset. It’s not socially acceptable to stand in a Southern Baptist Easter service and belt out a chorus of “Up From The Grave He Arose” when the child at your side has chicken poop all over his new white britches.

Mercifully, most Easter biddies were soon devoured by the family cat or inadvertently stepped on by clumsy adults. Perhaps it was God’s way of preserving the sanity of rural Southern mothers during an important Christian holiday.

As an adult, I once kept a flock of game chickens, best thought of here as Easter biddies with really bad attitudes. Game chickens don’t die when stepped on, they get even. Gamecocks (and hens, too) often rip and tear at each other and often vent their wrath on dogs, children, and wives. A wife, like a game rooster, has no sense of humor once she’s been spurred by her husband’s “pets.” And, by the way, once all grown up, game chickens have no fear whatsoever of the family cat.

Eventually, to preserve sanity and to avoid being homicidally assaulted by various loved ones, I donated my game flock to Cletus Monroe, who was doing a bit of farming at the time. His acreage provided the birds plenty of room and the nuisance factor diminished. The roosters fought in remote corners of the property and the hens nested near the barn. However, Clete being Clete, a confrontation was, of course, inevitable.

One day, Clete parked a tractor near an occupied game hen nest. The mama chicken promptly attacked the vehicle with a hell-for-leather assault. Game hens, particularly broody ones, don’t fuss, fume and bluster. They strike! Ignorantly amused, Clete walked to the front of the John Deere for a closer look. Spotting him, the hen quickly rerouted her charge.

It was summer and Clete, never one for making an agrarian fashion statement, was shirtless beneath his loose overalls. The chicken aimed for the open space between bib and bare chest, lodging there to peck and claw at will. Meanwhile, Clete did a little pecking and clawing of his own. The bird in his britches inched downward, soon arriving in that sensitive netherworld just below his waist.

Clete frenziedly vacated his old Tuff-Nuts, looking like he’d just gone one-on-one with a weedeater. He stood there clad in nothing but a shredded pair of boxers and well-worn brogans. The hen, victory won, soon calmed herself and resettled on her nest. Onlookers watching from a safe distance found it all very amusing.

After a brief recuperation, Clete returned to work, one eye constantly peeled for broody game chickens. I later asked him how he felt about the painful and embarrassing incident.

“Thankful,” he replied.

“Thankful?” I asked. “After almost getting turned into a soprano by a rabid chicken? What’s there to be thankful for?”

“Well, Hoss,” Clete said, “seein’ how it all turned out, I’m real thankful the little *&^%$#! didn’t have no spurs!”