ChickenFest Key West pays homage to the free-ranging poultry population.
By Associated Press
Published June 20, 2004
KEY WEST - The chickens that roam Key West's historic Old Town neighborhoods have something to cluck about this weekend.
ChickenFest Key West, a four-day party that ends today, pays homage to the free-ranging poultry population that supposedly descended from chickens once kept for food and eggs, as well as roosters bred generations ago for cockfights.
Fowl fanciers dressed in full-body yellow chicken suits and feathered headdresses, covered their noses with vinyl rooster beaks and donned red and yellow plush chicken-head caps to participate in festival events.
Among them is Saturday evening's Poultry in Motion Parade, slated to feature 10-foot-tall dancing chickens, a Colonel Sanders look-alike and a flock of renegade roosters staging a "coop d'etat" against a hapless human. The parade's star attraction: a 12-foot-high, toga-wearing rooster reclining on a chariot-drawn chaise dubbed "Chicken Caesar."
"Key West's chickens are such a big part of the island's egg-centric atmosphere that it was time we hatched a celebration in their honor," said festival director Linda O'Brien.
Other events included a Fowl Follies talent contest, a cook-off for food that tasted like chicken but wasn't, a rooster crowing challenge, a chicken beauty contest, and a Why Did the Chicken Cross the Street Fair whose entertainment highlight was a locally written, mini-musical titled "The Poultry Operetta."
Even Key West's official chicken catcher, hired by the city to help relocate 900 of the estimated 2,000 feathered residents to a mainland Florida farm, got into the festival spirit.
Armando Parra, who has trapped 450 chickens to date, posed for photos and sold chicken catcher T-shirts at the street fair, planned to judge today's chicken beauty contest and coordinated a competition to name a glossy rooster he calls the official Key West chicken.
Despite the revelry, Parra couldn't completely abandon his pursuit of poultry.
"When I see all these people dressed up in chicken costumes, it gives me an urge to throw a net over them," Parra said.
