The Japanese television crew is scrutably perplexed. "Very unique," the director grins bravely, contemplating a scene his team has flown half a world to film for a Tokyo special on the Guinness Book of World Records.
Their perplexity is understandable. Ten feet above their cameras, a wiry man perches on a white wooden platform that stands out sharply, in the bright Ohio sun, against the green pasture beneath. His T shirt bears the words INTERNATIONAL CHICKEN FLYING ASSOCIATION, along with a picture of a chicken in full flight, wearing a flying helmet. Perched on the man's own head, helmet fashion, is a large yellow-and-white knitted chicken.
Periodically he bends down, takes a genuine chicken from the outstretched hands of someone on the ground and inserts the bird into a large rural mailbox on the platform. Then he seizes a plumber's helper and, like an artilleryman ram-rodding home a shell, nudges the chicken's tail feathers and plunges it into flight. Beneath the launching platform is a triangular corral, several hundred feet long, fashioned with snow fences. In it waits a squad of small boys cradling large fish nets. As each chicken takes flight squawking in protest and spraying feathers, a boy dashes along its trajectory to net the flyer at its point of touchdown with the skill of an Izaak Walton landing a plump trout.
For first-tuners like the Japanese, it is a stunning panorama. There are 3.6 billion chickens in the U.S. but only 170 of them have made it to the 8th Annual International Chicken Flying Contest. It is held, as usual, in the rolling hill country of eastern Ohio, on the 1,100-acre Bob Evans farm at Rio Grande, a crossroads community on two-lane Route 35 between Chillicothe and Charleston, W. Va.
Chicken flying is of a piece with turtle derbies, crab races, frog jumps, armadillo rallies and possibly even buffalo chip tosses. There is no entry fee. Owners may enter as many birds as they please. Contestants are divided among four categories according to weight, and prizes of $25, $10 and $5 are awarded for the longest flights in each class, along with bright blue, red and yellow ribbons. Any chicken flying farther than the "world's record" —297 ft. 2 in., set in 1977 by a Japanese blacktail bantam named Kung Flewk —receives a cash prize of $500. What makes it fun is the unpredictability of the chickens. Some fly straight and true, or reasonably so, like Kung Flewk. Some refuse to fly at all, even with encouragement from a plunger. Some shift into reverse on takeoff. Since chickens are not natural aviators at the best of times, in a brisk breeze they can be pitiful to behold.