Chicken chuckers duck weather issues

They had the determination. They had the drive. They had funky chicken hats.

Surely they had a hard-to-beat strategy?

“Strategy?” said Val Nesset to her fellow team, The Mother Cluckers. “We had one, right?”

Turned out the team from Buffalo was winging it in their first foray into the world of chicken chuckin’ Sunday.

But this year’s annual International Chicken Chuckin’ event gave no one home turf advantage. Organizers switched to rubber chickens over the frozen kind for the first time due to balmy weather.

Instead of sliding frozen chickens on Martindale Pond, participants in the fundraising tournament gathered in Lakeside Park to hurl rubber fowl into truck tires.

Nesset’s fellow chucker Larry White said he was counting on the ice, having advantageous experience with frozen turkeys on linoleum.

“It’s kind of like bowing,” he said. “Turkeys are 9 to 16 pounds. You can get good at it.”

Their team of five was made up of professors and a PhD student from the University of Buffalo, who flocked to Port Dalhousie with Nesset. A library and information sciences teacher, she lives in both Buffalo and Port Dalhousie with her husband, who was on a rival team Sunday.

She vowed The Mother Cluckers will be back next year, having invested $6.50 each in chicken hats they bought via the Internet.

They weren’t the only ones to display colourful gear. Others wore raccoon tails, rubber chicken hats and Scottish kilts.

Dave Prentice, owner of the Kilt and Clover pub that co-ordinates the event, said 26 teams were out Sunday in Lakeside Park, with the $80 entry fee per team being donated to charity.

“It’s going to be quite significant for Hospice Niagara,” Prentice said. “It’s no chicken scratch.”

It was the 12th year for International Chicken Chuckin’, though not the first without ice. Prentice shudders to think of the 2004 tourney, which was held in rain and mud.

“It was 10 degrees and the chickens were melting. It was awful.”

In order to avoid that fowl occurrence this year, 16 rubber chicken dog toys were purchased from a pet store, though Prentice admitted they were actually ducks.

Ducks wearing purple bikinis.

No matter the feather, or weather, nothing could have kept longtime chucker Michael Kearns from the event.

“It would have taken no less than an act of God to keep me from here,” said Kearns, of the team That Episode of Who’s The Boss Where Tony Sees Angela Naked in the Shower.

Kearns joked he bathed in Swiss Chalet sauce and meditated in a chicken coop before catching his flight from Calgary for the event.

The team was the chicken chuckin’ champion in 2006 and a semi-finalists in 2007.

But with the new duck chuck this year, their previous ice time counted for little. It was anybody’s game.

And the Buffalo team, White said, had a professor of anthropology on its side.

“She was able to study the long and ancient tradition of chicken chuckin’.”