Feathering Her Nest

IN this story, it was the chicken that came first.

One afternoon in late March, three years ago, Hope Sandrow, a mixed-media artist, was looking for her cat in the woods near her house here. Rounding a tree, she ran smack into a large blond rooster. Nearly knee high, he was as tall as a young coyote and sported an eye-catching Warholian feather headdress.

Human and chicken goggled at each other, frozen for a moment. Ms. Sandrow recovered first and invited the chicken home. And the chicken, as Ulf Skogsbergh, Ms. Sandrow’s husband, put it the other day, “took one look at Hope and said, ‘That’s for me!’ ”

Their relationship — the rooster and Ms. Sandrow’s, that is — followed the usual fowl-meets-human trajectory.

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