Cheep Thrills

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Cheep Thrills
There's no profit in it, but the ornamental poultry circuit draws flocks of devotees.

Toward the front of the hall are Melissa Sobolewski, 17, and Shannon Fiedler, 12, both relatively new to competitive poultry shows. They met St. Amour at a state fair last year, and regularly e-mail her for advice. Shannon stops to introduce her grandmother.

"This is Miss Kay," she says. "She's our poultry leader."

BY 5:30 P.M. THE HALL IS ABUZZ WITH ACTIVITY, as competitors carry in chickens, ducks and geese and settle them down for a night away from home. With her birds all in, St. Amour joins a few friends in heading off to a nearby steakhouse. Over dinner, they talk about shows past, vexing poultry problems and who will be in attendance this weekend. Nobody orders the chicken.

Many poultry aficionados seem to have tried showing other animals -- dogs, cats, goats -- before crossing over to chickens and ducks. For St. Amour, it was Morgan horses, which the then-stay-at-home mom and military wife raised first while living in Texas and then on her farm in Maryland.

"Then I came to my senses," she says. "A lot of these people are moneyed people, and they're real snobs." She felt alienated, hated the cutthroat attitudes she saw around her.

"I once saw somebody drop their curry comb on the ground and somebody else, a competitor, kick it out of sight. Just very petty," she says. "Riding around the ring, I always felt like my mouth was sort of full of sawdust."

It was her son, then 14, who drew her to poultry. He and his 15-year-old sister had been raising chickens since St. Amour, on a whim, had bought them both pet chicks at the local feed store. At a county fair where her son was showing his laying hens for 4-H, "there was a judge there who told him, 'You can really make money showing chickens,'" says St. Amour. "I wish I could remember who that judge was, because I'd like to ask him how."

In fact, in all but a few cases, it's hard to imagine raising fancy poultry as a moneymaking proposition. A 50-pound bag of chicken feed costs $8 to $10 and lasts St. Amour only two days, and then there's gas, food and lodging for travel to shows, plus entry fees and other supplies. There's also the cost of the birds themselves, which ranges from $25 to $500, although a decent show bird usually goes for $50. Winning isn't much of a financial bonanza, either. The top-tier winners at the Delmarva show, for example, will take home $100 each, a prize that's considered generous in poultry circles.

In the beginning, though, St. Amour didn't quite know what she was in for -- or what she was doing.

Arriving at her first show in the early 1970s, she took one look at the competition and cringed at the scruffiness of her so-called Cochins. A fellow exhibitor finally strolled over and gently explained her handicap: " 'They're half Plymouth Rock,'" she recalls him saying. "This was my competition telling me what I could do so I could beat them." She sold her mutts, replaced them with purebreds, and decided this would be her new hobby.

Over the next few years, the flock grew to 1,000 birds in 35 breeds and varieties. The family raised and showed the chickens together until the children grew up and moved away, leaving St. Amour and her then-husband to care for the animals. After their daughter's death, it was the need to take care of the chickens -- feeding, watering, tending to the baby chicks -- that pulled St. Amour out of bed in the mornings. That, and the community she's found in the poultry show world. "We went to a show, and everybody there said, 'We're so glad you're getting out,'" says St. Amour.

In 1994, her 39-year marriage ended in divorce, leaving her alone with the farm and the chickens. Suddenly, "I didn't have anything else to distract me," she says. Pulling up a bucket, she'd sit by the chicken pen "and just watch them run around and do their little chicken things. Sometimes one would come over and jump up on my lap and make those crooning noises, talking to me," she says.