Once More With Footnotes Read Free

proportion of the chicken population at that time.
     
                  The driver of a gas tanker said that at the head of the little group was an elderly cockerel, who stared at him with supreme self-confidence, apparently waiting for something to happen.
     
                  Examination of the tanker's front offside wing suggests that the bird was a Rhode Island Red.
     
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                  Cogito ergo cluck.
     
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                  Periodically an itinerant, or the just p lain desperate, would dodge the traffic to the verge and liberate a sleeping chicken for supper.
     
                  This originally caused some concern to the Department of Health, who reasoned that the feral chickens, living as they did so close to the traffic, would have built up dangerously high levels of lead in their bodies, not to mention other noxious substances.
     
                  In 1978, a couple of research officers were sent into the thickets to bring back a few birds for a sacrifice to Science.
     
                  The birds' bodies were found to be totally lead-free.
     
                  We do not know whether they checked any eggs.
     
                  This is important (see Document C).
     
                  They did remark incidentally, however, that the birds appeared to have been fighting amongst themselves. (See Document F: Patterns of Aggression in Enclosed Environments, Helorksson and Frim, 1981.) We must assume, in view of later developments, that this phase passed.
     
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                  Four peck-(neck stretch) and seven cluck-scratch ago, our crow-(peck left foot)-squawk brought forth upon this cluck-cluck-sq uawk ...
     
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                  In the early hours of 10 March 1981, Police Officer James Stooket Stasheff, in pursuit of a suspect, following a chase which resulted in a seven-car collision, a little way from the verge, saw a construction apparently made of long twigs, he ld together with cassette tape, extending several feet into the carriageway. Two chickens were on the end of it, with twigs in their beaks. "They looked as if they was nest building," he now recalls. "I went past again about 10 a.m. It was all smashed up i n the gutter."
     
                  Officer Stasheff went on to say, "You always get tapes along the freeway. Any freeway. See, when they get snarled up in the Blaupunkt or whatever, people just rip 'em out and pitch them through the window."
     
                  According to Ruse and Sixbury { Bulletin of the Arkham Ornithological Society, vol. 17, pp. 124-132,1968) birds may, under conditions of chronic stress, build nests of unusual size and complexity (Document D).
     
                  This is not necessarily advanced as an explanation.
     
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                  Peck ... peck ... scratch.
     
                  Scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch.
     
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                  The collapse of a small section of carriageway near the verge in the summer of 1983 is not considered germane to this study. The tunnel underneath it was put down to gophers. Or foxes. Or some other burrowing animal. What were irresponsibly described as shoring timbers must simply have been, for example, bits of timber that accidentally got carried into the tunnel by floodwater, as it were, and wedged. Undoubtedly the same thing happened with the feathers.
     
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                  If Cluck were meant to fly, they'd have bigger (flap).
     
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                  Testimony of Officer Stasheff