Avian Flu Ruffling Feathers at 4-H Clubs

Corn feed prices have skyrocketed, chimed in Laura Gaylord, 17. To cover costs, they'll have to find individual buyers who pay a lot less per head than do participants at the live auction.

"We really do need to sell them. We spent a lot," said Allison Hinke, 16, who, together with her siblings Brandon and Carol, both 14, built summer and winter huts in their home near Leesburg for their first poultry club batch of eight chickens. A goat that Allison was planning to show at the fair died July 5, so the chickens were her last hope.

Meanwhile, at the Fauquier fair, the 450 birds due for exhibition will be featured instead in posters stuck on their original cages, said club leader Briget Kane. Camille Lewandowski, 13, of Warrenton would have brought along 15 birds, including pheasants and ducks.

The seven-year 4-H veteran has a room crammed with East Coast poultry show trophies and ribbons so numerous that they overflow from the walls into two baskets. But, Camille said, even placing second for showmanship in the 2006 poultry show nationals was nothing next to missing the fair, where her friends and fellow 4-H members normally would get to see her prize specimens, including a Japanese Phoenix chicken and its two-foot-long iridescent green plumes.

Camille said she lost count of the dozens of chicks that she had hatched specially for the fair, and she expressed concern about what to do with them. There's barely enough room in her back yard for the 20-odd coops housing all her other feathered critters.

At both fairs, hatching displays that feature incubated eggs, an audience favorite, have also been prohibited. But discussions are underway between club leaders and state officials to secure the right to show eggs, in all their green-and-blue, speckled and chocolate brown varieties.

On another farm near Purcellville, Gabriella Tilton, 8, chased a flock around an open pen, seized her favorite bird, Puff, a baby snow-white Leghorn hybrid, and looked up at her mother.

"Can I show her next year, Mama?" she asked.