Tampabay: Chicken coup: One big 'whoosh' and they're gone

Chicken coup: One big 'whoosh' and they're gone

With a cluck, cluck here and a cluck, cluck there, a trapper's mighty net rounds up 24. The birds have something to crow about: dozens more escaped.

By KELLEY BENHAM, Times Staff Writer

LARGO -- The crowing quieted and the strutting stopped when the chicken hunter arrived with his net launcher.

Urban life in the Ridgecrest neighborhood has made the chickens wary. Cars run over them as they try to cross the road. Children kick cans at them. Grownups chase them with brooms, hoses and bricks. Yet the chickens have prospered.

But Thursday morning brought professional animal trapper Charles Carpenter in his khaki shorts, with his air cannons.

Carpenter unloaded his giant net, staked it near the chickens' hideout, and hooked it to pressurized air guns designed to unleash it in one furious, inescapable blast.

"Stand back," he said. "These are dangerous when they fire."

Pinellas County officials called on Carpenter, who owns Animal Capture of Florida, after the chicken population passed 100 and residents complained. To prepare the way for his custom artillery, Carpenter enlisted the help of a disarmingly sweet woman named Rose Redding.

Mrs. Redding, 75, lives closest to the chickens' main hangout at Gooden Crossing and 119th Street. She feeds the birds, but she does not love them.

"They are some nasty chickens," she said.

They poop on her driveway and block traffic. Their crowing mixes with the morning rumble of the school bus and keeps her up at night. At times, a barnyard aroma wafts over to her house.

The chickens have lived in Ridgecrest at least 30 years. Residents once regularly gathered the eggs. Now most get their eggs at the grocery store, leaving the brown eggs to hatch.

They travel in bands, the neighbors say. One of the leaders is called Whitecoat, a surly white rooster with a few black feathers. Whitecoat has dodged a lot of rocks. Another rooster is called Barnyard Billy.

Now and then someone will propose a barbecue or a pot of dumplings, but inevitably the chickens are deemed unsuitable for serving, and are spared.

In recent weeks, it has been Mrs. Redding's duty to train the chickens to cluster around her cracked corn in a tight feathery target.

It took time. They were cocky and uncooperative. Thirty might come when she appeared with her pan of corn. But dozens more stayed under the bushes, atop the fences and in the trees.

"They say they've got a net as big as this house," she said. "Let me tell you, those chickens are not going to stand there and let them drop that net."

Carpenter, 44, of Tampa, had supreme confidence in his invention. He got the idea from the John Wayne movie, Hatari! The Duke used a net launched by gunpowder to trap monkeys. Carpenter saw the movie as a kid and never forgot it.

Before the net launcher, he chased chickens with hand-held nets. He doesn't recommend it. Dart guns are too expensive. Drugging the chicken feed takes time and upsets onlookers, because the chickens flop around on their way to unconsciousness.

In city settings, Carpenter can't use gunpowder like John Wayne did, so he improvised with pressurized air. His launcher deploys a 2,500-square-foot net in less than a second, snaring geese, ducks, chickens or pigeons before they can flee.

When he gave the signal about 10 a.m. Thursday, Mrs. Redding entered the target zone.

The chickens streamed from their roost under a low-hanging tangerine tree. Mrs. Redding heaved her corn. Then she slipped out of the way.

All was quiet for a second.

Then there was a whump and a whoosh and a blast of air and a streak of white, and the net came down and the squawking began.

The chickens hopped like they'd stepped in hot grease. They bounced and clucked and frantically fluttered their trapped wings. Little heads poked through the net in alarm, jerking from side to side, blinking furiously.

Somebody said "Omigod," and somebody else said, "Whoa," and the chickens just jumped and screeched.

Mrs. Redding watched from her plastic porch chair, smug and satisfied.

The chicken hunter and his father, Ed Carpenter, hauled the chickens out and carried them to their cage by their wings and by their feet as the inverted chickens complained sorrowfully.

A little speckled hen saw an opening in the net. She burst loose, high-stepped toward freedom and disappeared under the bushes.

"Run, run chicken," spectator Cory Timmy said, laughing. "Charles ain't gonna let no more go."

When all the chickens were penned and fretting, awaiting transport to their new home with a Plant City livestock dealer, neighbors searched for familiar faces.

"Where is Whitecoat?" one said. "He's bad."

Whitecoat was not in the cage. Neither was Barnyard Billy.

The 24 captured chickens were young and probably hung out together so the big roosters wouldn't beat them up, Carpenter said. County officials will decide if and when Carpenter returns to Ridgecrest. Thursday's roundup cost about $650.

Neighbors hope he comes back. The wisest and wiliest roosters are still at large.

"They're the slickest chickens you ever saw," resident Myra McCaskill said. "Those are city chickens."

Off in the distance, from treetops and bushes and hideouts unknown, roosters crowed.