<lass="page section layoutArea column" title="Page 1">
Two weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon, sophomore David Goodell helped junior Malcolm Fox carry a hefty package back to his room in Allen House. While walking back up the stairs behind Musser, he looked to the right and saw a “really strangely colored bird.”
“It was black — I would call it peppered, the coloring,” Goodell said, “and I think it was a chicken.”
Goodell’s encounter was one of many student sightings in the first weeks of the term of a chicken clucking around Musser and the townhouses.
Tina Sieben ’18 saw the chicken three times. “The first time I was just going for a run, walking down the steps outside Musser, and there was this chicken there,” Sieben said.
“He was this gray, very majestic looking chicken. I tried to stop and get a picture of it, but it wouldn’t look at me. I never felt so inferior to a chicken. It was so above me. I saw it again a couple days later, same time, same place.”
The chicken, who has been called various names including Holly and Randy (sex unconfirmed), was suspected of roosting in the brush behind Musser.
On September 23rd, however, Senior Kayla Becich awoke to the sounds of the chicken “wailing.” When she looked at the window of her 3rd Musser dorm room, she saw three Musser custodians attempting to capture it by hand.
After some time the custodians achieved their task, with a male custodian grasping the chicken and petting its head to calm it, according to Becich.
One of the female custodians offered to bring the chicken home to her neighbors, who purportedly raised chickens and could care for it. The custodians told Becich, “they preferred the thought of the chicken in the care of their neighbors instead of its entrapment or freezing in the winter.”
The Musser custodians in question could not be contact for comment. Though both Custodial Manager Patti Sabrowski and Grounds Manager Jay Stadler reported having heard of the wandering chicken, neither was aware of its capture or final wherabouts.
It is also still unknown how the fowl came to roost in the Musser brush in the first place, though students have their theories. “I figured it just escaped from Burton,” Goodell said.
