Photo by Tom Campbell

Since Little Peep never had a mother, he followed Bennett everywhere, no leash necessary.

By all accounts, the chick was dead. The shell still covered the top half of the bird’s featherless body. Its lower body was covered in blood where it was still attached to the embryonic membrane.

Tory Bennett, a postdoctoral student in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, was house sitting this past summer for associate professor Barny Dunning when she noticed something amiss in Dunning’s henhouse.

A raccoon had attacked and killed a hen sitting on 10 eggs. So Bennett, a native of Cotswolds, England, put the eggs under two other hens. But on June 25, days before the chicks were ready to hatch, one of the hens rejected the eggs by pecking open the shells.

“I picked up the chick to throw away,” Bennett says, “but I felt his little chest moving.” Recalling what she learned from an animal physiology class, Bennett heated a knife over a flame. She carefully cut off the egg membrane and used the edge of the hot knife to cauterize the bleeding wounds. She removed the shell section covering the bird’s head and heard the faintest of chirps.

His eyes were still closed.

Photo by Tom Campbell

Tory Bennett nursed LP (Little Peep) back to health after the chick hatched prematurely this summer.

Bennett found a pipette small enough to feed a butterfly, gave the tiny chicken some water and christened him “LP,” short for “Little Peeper,” the first sound he made.

“I thought he was a goner,” Bennett says. “I didn’t think he would survive an hour, let alone the first night.”

So she placed him in the crook of her neck to keep him warm as she lay down to sleep. Neither moved. The chick was physically unable; the woman feared that any movement would crush the tiny bird.

With round-the-clock care, LP survived, and he began to act as if Bennett was his mother, a phenomenon known as imprinting. She fed him processed corn millet and spoiled him with mealworms. So, naturally, he followed her everywhere. If LP wandered away, a call or a simple shake of the mealworm container brought LP quickly back to her side.

It became common to see the small chicken scurrying along behind her as she made her way across campus.

She put him in a small handbag when he tired and carried him until he was rested enough to resume walking.

But by the end of August, LP began crowing every morning — early every morning — from his favorite perch on a towel rack in Bennett’s apartment. He also began to chase birds that invaded his “territory” on campus.

So Bennett arranged an adoption by a couple with a nice chicken coop and an enclosed area where LP could roam.

“I have gone to visit him, and he seems to be coping better than I did at leaving him,” Bennett says. “He’s my baby, and I love him. I guess he imprinted on me, too.”

Contact Bennett at vbennett@purdue.edu