Chickens

When I started this blog in the summer of 2013, I never in my wildest imaginings thought I would be devoting a whole post to chickens. Nonetheless, that's exactly what I'm doing, even though the length of this post is succinct by my standards. I guess if my trip to Key West last month taught me anything, it's to be ready for anything in life and just go with it. I guess I didn't really learn that necessarily in Key West, but I imagine I would have if I stayed there long enough.

I think that one of the best things about stepping off your front doorstep and going someplace new is that every so often, you find something truly surprising or curious. In heading south to Key West for a couple of days I expected to find gorgeous scenery, good food and maybe a bar or two and I think I found all of that. But what I also found when we stepped off the Doubletree Hotel shuttle bus on our first trip downtown was a number of chickens roaming free. And I'm not talking about one or two or a fowl which should have been in someone's yard that got loose, these things are regular encounters on the streets of Key West. I found that both surprising and curious. And worth spending few paragraphs on.

When I'm in a strange place and I encounter wild chickens on the streets, I always ask the locals what the deal is here. Turns out they don't necessarily know. At least the ones we asked. The information offered to us was very non-specific. We were told by some of the vendors that we asked that the birds might be escaped captive chickens once kept as farming birds and that they might have been brought to Key West to combat the insect population. We were also told that "they've always been here." I'm doubting that last one. Maybe our sights were set too high. I can understand the convenience store clerk not knowing too much but we stopped in a Key West chickens themed shop and asked. I would think the woman in there would have been some sort of authority.

Now because I'm a curious guy, I had to find out the skinny on these things when I got back home. Turns out the internet doesn't necessarily know a whole lot more than the folks we asked on the island do. If there's one thing the internet seems to agree on, it's that the chickens are an introduced or feral species. There are no natural chicken predators on the island and the birds seem to be especially adept at controlling both the native cockroach and scorpion populations, which folks generally don't seem to mind. When the birds actually were brought to Key West seems to have the internet in a bit of a spot. Some reports I read claimed the chickens were brought to the island during the Great Depression as a sustainable way of putting food on the table; other articles claimed the chickens arrived with immigrants in the 1800s, maybe from Cuba who brought them not just for food but also for sport (meaning fighting each other). 

There doesn't seem to be any explanation as to why there are so many roaming free other than that's what chickens do in Key West. The initial reason is what I was after. I can accept that maybe a person or two released or lost a pet chicken every so often. But to get the quantity of chickens that you encounter in Key West must have required some sort of fowl freeing epidemic. I guess maybe it's one of those things lost in history. I've accepted after a few sessions of searching that I'm not getting to any sort of sure thing answer. Maybe I should be softer on the locals that we talked to.

I'm sure the chickens are great for the tourists. I mean they don't really affect our lives other than having to wait for one to cross the road (insert joke here) every so often when you are trying to get to the next bar. They are super colorful and generally harmless. I suppose if I were staying right in town, I might have been annoyed when I was awoken at sunrise by the crowing of a rooster, but fortunately our property out at the Doubletree was mercifully cockerel free. Anyway, that's all I have to say about these things. If you ever get to Key West, expect to see some chickens. I didn't.