Fair chicken showing goes virtual and...stuffed

MOSES LAKE — Poultry judge Emmett Wild stands across the table from the two young women in FFA jackets. He looks serious, as do the two teenage exhibitors, even as they each tightly grip a stuffed chicken.

“Check your bird for external parasites,” he commands.

Jeslan Valdez, 16, lifts up a wing of her stuffed chicken, slides a finger along the underside to show where she would look, then quickly lifts up the rear and brushes her hand against it.

“What would be the signs that your bird has parasites?” Wild asks.

“It would be stressed out,” Valdez said, continuing her response with a list of signs and symptoms her bird would clearly show if it had mites, lice or anything else that can make its home on a real, live chicken.

Valdez and her fellow FFA poultry shower Paige Ball, both FFA members, are showing off stuffed chickens in the Poultry Barn at this year’s Grant County Fair following a request from the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s chief veterinarian to hold off on live poultry shows until 30 days after the last confirmed case of highly pathogenic avian influenza, which was most recently detected in a small, backyard flock in Jefferson County on July 26.

There is no cure for avian influenza, and flocks, where the disease has been detected, must be destroyed. So far, the spread of the disease in Washington state has been limited to domesticated flocks, but millions of birds — mainly in the Midwest — in commercial broiler and egg production operations have been destroyed as a result of the disease.

Wild peppers the FFA students with questions — What is the color of your bird’s eggs? What are the symptoms of avian influenza? How long does it take for a chicken egg to hatch? How long for a duck egg? — questions he said he would have asked regardless of whether the students had real birds to show or not.

“Yeah, it’s a little different than our average fair,” said Wild, a senior farm planner with the Skagit County Conservation District and himself a poultry exhibitor.

Wild said fairs across the Pacific Northwest are dealing with the bird flu outbreak a little bit differently. He said he recently judged at a fair with live birds, though veterinarians examined each entry prior to showing, and made sure to maintain distance between each exhibitor. However, he also said he judged another fair like this year’s Grant County Fair, where exhibitors showed photos and demonstrated their knowledge on relatively life-sized stuffed chickens.

In a show like this one, Wild said exhibitors aren’t able to demonstrate their showmanship, to show off their ability to handle their bird.

“Today, we don't really get to evaluate their handling so much, because we don't have live birds,” he said. “So I'm looking more for what is their knowledge about husbandry of the animals about their specific breed.”

Valdez said the stuffed birds had a certain advantage, though the inability to show off a real bird meant she also had to answer more questions.

“The fake birds are easier to handle than the real birds,” she said. “But he probably would have asked us to show more parts on the actual chicken instead of just naming some.”

Kady McCrae, 13, who was showing a broad-breasted white turkey — and there didn’t appear to be a stuffed version of a turkey anywhere in the poultry barn — said she likes showing off birds because they can easily be trained to like people.

“Like when you're little you handle them, and they like you. If you don't handle them, they're going to be a little aggressive, and they’re not going to enjoy your company,” she said. “But if you handle them, they engage with you. They love you. They follow you. They cooperate.”

The virtual poultry show will conclude on Friday with an online auction. The Grant County Fair runs through Friday at the county fairgrounds in Moses Lake.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.