Chickens & Cannons
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Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. Today I have a rather peculiar story for you and it begins with a researcher named Elias Loomis, who, in 1842 performed an experiment that...well, just let me read this to you from his book. These are his words:

"Several live, featherless chickens attracted much attention after a recent tornado. In order to determine the wind velocity needed to pull feathers from the chicken we experimented as follows. A six-pound cannon was loaded with five ounces of powder and a freshly killed chicken, with its feathers. The gun was pointed upward and fired. My conclusions are that a chicken forced through the air with this velocity is torn entirely to pieces; so tornadoes likely possess wind speeds of less than the measured chicken speed of 341 miles per hour."

OK, that's pretty grim. But still, 135 years later, Professor Bernard Vonnegut in Albany, New York was asked to look again at chicken plucking as a measure of tornado wind speed, but not the same way. Vonnegut quickly learned about flight molt, something that makes feathers loosen in the face of danger. It's like tear away feathers, a defense mechanism so that a chicken starved predator ends up with a mouthful of feathers instead of a mouthful of giblets. Vonnegut figured that tornadoes scare chickens and flight molt kicks in, so that even a tiny tornado could blow the feathers off. So no chickenometers to record tornado windspeeds. Vonnegut did have a distinguished career studying raindrops, something that had to do with foul weather, but not fowl weather.

The Weather Notebook does not support firing chickens out of a cannon, but we are supported by Subaru the beauty of all wheel drive and by the National Science Foundation.