Why Florida’s iconic feral flocks in Key West and Ybor City just might hold the key to saving chickens everywhere.
Every night in Ybor City, as booming music began to resonate from cigar factories-turned-nightclubs, Elvis hid in the shadows. For the streets full of young Floridians ready for a night they can’t remember, it was fun. For him, it was a threat.
This Elvis didn’t have blue suede shoes or a hip swivel that could make anyone swoon like his namesake. But he did have similarly iconic dark coiffed locks, an aesthetic that earned him more trouble than acclaim in the street chicken world. That’s why each evening as the sun bid adieu to Ybor, chicken rescuer Dylan Breese tuned out the music and tuned in to the tiny taps of talons on pavement and the little flutter of unsuccessful wings.
By day, Elvis had all the suave appeal of The King, with his curled, frizzled feathers rocking the streets of the Northeast Tampa enclave known as Cigar City. But at night, Elvis’s unique plumage was trouble. Abandoned in the streets of Ybor, Elvis lacked the feral genetics to survive. He quite literally wasn’t born for this: his unruly feathers couldn’t catch enough wind to roost as high as other birds, leaving him to hide in bushes, unable to fully escape the crowds and chaos of nightlife.
“He would come up to me and wait for me to pick him up,” Breese says. “I put him on the lowest branch of his favorite tree, and he would climb up the rest of the way. And if I happened to see him the next morning, we would admire each other from a distance, not get too close. He was either…