Since 1999, the town of Fruita, Colorado, has held its annual “Mike the Headless Chicken Day” on the third weekend of May.
The holiday was created to honor Mike, the headless chicken (a rooster of the Wyandotte breed), which lived another 18 months after being decapitated. In 1945, farmer Lloyd Olsen from the town of Fruita intended to cook a chicken for dinner. He cut off its head in such a way that most of the brainstem was left in the upper part of the spine, and one ear survived.
The chicken nevertheless survived, having only lost the ability to see and foam. He could still hear and maintain basic vital functions, ruffled feathers, and attempted to make sounds. The farmer decided to keep him alive, fed him small grains, and gave him water with a dropper.
The chicken behaved almost completely normally, slept on the perch, and tried to crow every morning, but only a bubbling sound could be heard. Mike choked on his mucus, which was removed by the farmer with a syringe. The chicken at the time of decapitation was five and a half months old and weighed 1.1 kg. After eighteen months of living without its head, its weight had increased to 3.6 kg.
Mike became a tourist attraction in a traveling museum of strange creatures. His photos appeared in the press, and his owner earned up to 4,500 then-current dollars a month from showing the rooster. A severed, preserved head of the bird was also shown, although it was not the original head, as this one had been eaten by a cat.
When a farmer stayed at a hotel in Phoenix after the show in 1947, it turned out that he hadn’t taken a syringe with him to remove the mucus, and Chicken Mike suffocated.
