Round the County: This one's for the birds
Deana Olsen said two chickens, a rooster and a hen, were hanging (roosting?) around the courthouse, in the trees, this past spring. "They had gotten out from somewhere," said Olsen, office manager for Marion County Emergency Medical Service.
"They were there for two weeks. George and Gracie, we called them. They were bantams. One morning, Gracie was gone. But George established residency, and I started feeding him.
"A fox probably got her," Olsen said. Could make you think of Elaine's (Julia Louis-Dreyfus') famous line on "Seinfeld," "Maybe a dingo ate your baby," which, in turn, I guess, comes from a Meryl Streep movie.
"Then we had an ice storm. It got down into the teens, but George survived. He crowed loudly, and everyone knew about it
He would run toward her, then stop 20 feet from her, Olsen said. Then he'd walk around, cluck and talk, and when she left, he would eat the corn she had left him.
"He finally got so he would get within five feet of me," Olsen said. "He was not catatonic from the cold (weather), but one day I finally caught him."
She showed him nothing but kindness, petting him and caring for him. "Actually, we renamed him 'Leon' after he was 'widowed,'" Olsen said.
Marion County Clerk Carol Maggard said county officials used to catch and release birds that had flown into some of the courthouse fireplaces and were trapped.
"We'd hear them cheeping. I rescued three or four myself from the commissioners' meeting room fireplace, took them outside and freed them. They couldn't fly straight back up to escape after getting in there.
"We have special screens on the chimneys now, to save them, to keep them from getting in."
She said county commissioners at times had hard hats laying around in the commission meeting room, for when they went out to look at roads and bridges in the county.
Once, someone used a hard hat to hurriedly place over a bird in the room, to capture it and then release it.
— JERRY BUXTON
