Fruita – Mike the Headless Chicken once again will be honored this month by a festival in his name, but the famous Fruita fowl that lived 18 months with no head in the 1940s may be upstaged this year by another lucky cluck – a local chicken that recently drowned and was brought back to life with mouth-to-beak resuscitation.
The little buff Orpington chicken, which is variously being called Lucky or Resusci-Buffy, will star as the grand marshal of the Mike the Headless Chicken Festival on May 20. The miracle bird also has garnered a segment on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.”
A Comedy Central crew on May 2 filmed the chicken’s owner, Eugene Safken of Colbran, demonstrating fowl resuscitation on the real chicken, on a rubber chicken and on a grocery- store rotisserie chicken outfitted with a prosthetic head.
Safken also has been notified that he and his hen will receive an award from the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
“My phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” said Safken, a contractor who said he never expected to garner his 15 minutes of fame from a pet pullet.
Organizers of the May 20-21 Mike the Headless Chicken Festival also are pleased to have another fowl phenomenon to bring new attention to the odd event, now in its seventh year and still attracting worldwide curiosity.
“The mouth-to-mouth thing sure doesn’t hurt us at all,” said Barb Avery, who will be selling headless-chicken cookbooks at the festival alongside purveyors of handcrafted “chicken-noodle soap” and headless-chicken toilet paper.
The stories of the two rare birds of Mesa County are separated by six decades and two owners with vastly different intentions, but they share a common theme of bird tenacity.
Mike the Headless Chicken became a legend and earned a somewhat gruesome spread in Life magazine after his owner, farmer Lloyd Olsen of Fruita, lopped off his head with Sunday dinner in mind. Mike flopped around as butchered chickens sometimes do, then gurgled a few clucks and, sans head, resumed the motion of pecking for food.
It turned out his brain stem was still intact.
Farmer Olsen took his headless chicken on the vaudeville circuit, where Mike was a sideshow marvel until he choked on a piece of the corn that Olsen would drop into his gullet.
Lucky or Resusci-Buffy’s miracle moment came last month after she tumbled from a chicken roost into a tub of water in Safken’s barn.
Safken said that when he found the little chicken floating cold and stiff in the frigid water, his immediate instinct was to save his pet – and his investment. He had spent $107 at Murdoch’s Ranch & Home Supply the week before for a gaggle of chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys, and had already lost four turkeys.
Safken had learned CPR on a Resusci-Annie mannequin, so he began blowing into the bird’s beak and massaging its chest.
He brought it into the house and aimed a blow dryer at it while he continued CPR and while his girlfriend yelled at him to “leave the damned chicken alone. It’s dead.”
“It opened one eye, and I continued to blow-dry it. After a while, it opened both eyes and cheeped,” Safken said.
“Bird lungs are weird. They are not like ours. … The way they are built, it’s unlikely you could move air in and out of a chicken by blowing in its beak,” said Grand Junction veterinarian Bruce Kronkright. “But pumping its chest could potentially help, and warming it probably helped too. Technically, that’s still resuscitation – just not exactly mouth-to-beak resuscitation.”
Today, Safken said, the chicken is as healthy as the other birds.
The chicken will make its live local debut at a festival that also will feature chicken-dance and chicken-recipe contests, frozen-chicken bowling, raw- chicken football, a hot-wing eating contest, a “Run Like a Headless Chicken” race and a showing of “Chick Flick” – a documentary film about the headless chicken.
With all the new publicity garnered by Safken’s chicken, as well as the addition of a car show and a rose show, organizers say they expect to set an attendance record for the homespun festival.
A spokesman for the “Daily Show” said the miracle-chicken segment is still in production, and a run date has not been set.
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
