Skip to main content

Chicken-pluckin’ Controversy

March 2023
1min read

The article on the history and sometimes bizarre whims of tornadoes, “The Winds of Ruin” (June/July, 1978) by C. W. Gusewelle, noted that researchers had never found “real proof” to confirm the prairie legend that the great winds sometimes pluck chickens clean. Joseph G. Galway and Dr. Joseph T. Shaefer, meteorologists with the National Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City, Missouri, have written in to disagree. “While it is not the mission of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center to record tornadoes which deplumed fowls,” they say, “enough events of this phenomenon have been documented over the past one hundred and forty years to warrant acceptance. …” Rather than deny the reality of such weird incidents, they continue, most investigators have tried to find out just how they occur. One such indefatigable researcher was Professor Elias Loomis of Western Reserve College in Ohio, who in 1842 attempted to simulate the tornado’s plucking power using a cannon, then meticulously recorded the results: “The gun was charged with five ounces of powder, and a chicken just killed added for a ball. As the gun was small, it was necessary to press down the chicken with considerable force, by which means it was probably somewhat bruised. The gun was pointed vertically upwards and fired; the feathers rose twenty or thirty feet, and were scattered by the wind. On examination they were found to be pulled out clean. … The body was torn into small fragments, only a part of which could be found.”

Science marches on. Still, no one since Professor Loomis has come any closer to determining precisely what happens when chicken and tornado meet. Are the feathers simply blown off by the three-hundred-mile wind? Is the electrical field in the funnel’s vicinity or reduced atmospheric pressure inside it responsible? Or does the bird’s anxiety (understandable) in the face of the big wind cause it to molt instantaneously? Whatever the cause, that they do get plucked seems amply documented.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April/May 1979"

Authored by: Michal Mcmahon

How the Philadelphia waterworks became a potent symbol of our lost belief that nature and technology could live together in harmony

Authored by: Kenneth S. Davis

Had Franklin D. Roosevelt not been so conservative, we might have had national health insurance forty years ago

Authored by: Charlton Ogburn

He was the first Englishman to give a detailed description of the North American wilderness. Was it a pack of lies?

Authored by: T. H. Watkins

Maligned and misunderstood throughout much of their history, the Penitentes of the American Southwest have nevertheless given their people a sense of community and spiritual security. But for how much longer?

Authored by: Frances W. Saunders

Wilson's letters to Mary were frequent and intimate, but it would have been political suicide to marry a divorcee by the post-Victorian standards of the time

Authored by: Natalie Crouter

During three harrowing years as a prisoner of the Japanese, an American woman secretly kept an extraordinary journal of suffering, hope, ingenuity, and human endurance

Authored by: William C. Franz

A ponderous memorial to a people who refused to vanish

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.