As per online sites HGTV, USA Today, and The Chicken Coop Company: “The longest recorded flight of a modern chicken lasted 13 seconds for a distance of just over three hundred feet.”

Where did this occur? Who recorded the flight? Whose chicken was it? Inquiring minds wanna know. Despite finding a number of online references to this 13-second flight, I was unable to locate the original source and further details about this remarkable fowl.

Whose name was Mike, as claimed by one of the AI overviews that Google offered me. As Google notes, however, “Generative AI is experimental.” And experience taught me some time ago to take these overviews with a hefty grain of salt. After a bit more research, I learned that Mike was the Headless Chicken that lived for 18 months after his beheading (source: Wikipedia).

As asserted by a different AI overview, Muffy was the 13-second flyer. But with a bit more digging, I discovered that Muffy officially holds the title of oldest chicken ever (source: Guinness World Records). Hatched in 1989, she died 23 years later in 2011. (And at least one of the references I found earlier says that the recorded 13-second flight occurred in 2014.)

Even the Guinness Book of World Records apparently doesn’t mention the recorded flight. However, it does include this entry:

“Longest poultry flight: Sheena, a barnyard bantam owned by Bill and Bob Knox, flew 192.07 m (630 ft 2 in) at Parkesburg, Pennsylvania, USA, on 31 May 1985.”

Identical twins Bill and Bob Knox, and their bantam’s record-setting flight, are mentioned in an article by Ellen Warren for the Chicago Tribune (20 April 1997), reproduced in The Monitor and archived online at Newspapers.com: “Scaring away geese has become full-time job for man, his swans”

For a brief discussion of wing loading for chickens (written for the lay person, no pun intended), see this article by Gail Damerow for Cackle Hatchery (11 October 2022): Why Can’t Chickens Fly?

Damerow’s article includes the following statement, but without citing the source: “The official world record for the greatest distance for a chicken in flight is 301.5 feet.”

(Links were retrieved on 19 March 2025.)