On this day in 1945, a farmer in Fruita, Colorado went out to the yard to sort out dinner. He came back in without dinner and, eventually, with a pet.
The bird was a Wyandotte cockerel, and the axe had missed most of his brain stem. A blood clot did the rest of the work, and Mike — as he came to be called — simply carried on. He was fed with an eyedropper, water and a milk mixture trickled down where his throat still was (grain went the same way), and he grew. He toured. He was, briefly, nationally famous.
Eighteen months. That's how long he kept going, until March 1947, and Guinness still lists him as the longest-surviving headless chicken on record. Which raises the obvious question: how do you commemorate a bird like that? Fruita worked it out. Every May the town holds Mike the Headless Chicken Day, with running races and, I'm told, a fair amount of chicken-based cookery.
The man who swung the axe kept him alive for a year and a half. That's the bit I like.
Pip, most of a chicken's daily business runs low in the skull — heartbeat, breathing, balance, the walking reflex all sit in the brain stem, which the axe largely spared. It's why he could still perch and preen at something like a wing's rhythm. The eyedropper was the harder work, and that was all the farmer.
The clot is the quiet hero here, Pip. A wound like that would normally bleed freely, but clotting is a fast cascade — platelets plug the gap, then a mesh of fibrin sets over them like jelly over a sieve — and once the major vessels sealed, his brain stem could get on with breathing and heartbeat, which is most of what it does.