GREEN BAY - Between the three of them, Otis Day, Katie Schurk and Nick Vitrano have had some pretty memorable live call-ins during their radio careers, but Tuesday morning was a first.
“I live on the west side of Green Bay and my chicken got loose and got out and we’ve been searching everywhere for it,” came the voice on the other end of the line during the “KISS-FM Mornings with Otis, Katie and Nick” show. “... I’ve called everybody and I’m just wondering if you can help me?”
Day’s first thought: “This sounds made-up. That’s what I’m thinking.”
But then came the kicker.
“I can’t even make this up if I tried,” the caller says. “The chicken’s name is Chicken Nugget.”
Any temptation to make chicken nugget hot mustard sauce jokes was quickly dashed when the three 95.9 KISS-FM co-hosts realized Wendy Sellers was genuinely distraught. They could hear it in her voice.
“Oh no, this is her pet, this is her baby,” Schurk said.
Chicken Nugget had gone missing around noon Monday. Sellers, who lives near the Green Bay Area Public School District building on Broadway, has four hens (and the $5 required license from the city) she sometimes let roam outside the coop in the backyard.
Had Chicken Nugget been picked up by a hawk and dropped — or worse? Was she able to fly high enough to get up on top of the fence? Would she eventually find her way back home?
As “a first-time chicken mom” Sellers had no idea. She just knew she wanted as many people as possible on the lookout for that sweet gray chicken so tame that if you pat the top of your leg she’ll jump up on it.
Sellers, who drives a van for the school district, alerted her fellow drivers and some of the women in the office, who all went out calling for her. She called Lamers Bus Lines, a taxi company, the non-emergency number of the Green Bay Police Department, the Wisconsin Humane Society Green Bay Campus and Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary.
She thought of “KISS-FM Mornings with Otis, Katie and Nick,” because it's the kind of platform that can reach a lot of people. She listens to the show every day in the van and still has a framed napkin that Schurk, Vitrano and Jim Murphy autographed for her when she met them at an event years ago during their days at WIXX-FM.
Something about Sellers' big, friendly personality and the plight of a very approachable urban chicken last spotted by two women in the area of Ashland Avenue and West Mason Street resonated with KISS-FM listeners, who immediately began texting in with offers of help.
Bergstrom Chevrolet on Ashland said they would put popcorn out in hopes of attracting Chicken Nugget. Somebody was sending out a whole team to search. Somebody else reported their boyfriend who lives in the area had gone out looking.
Direct messages poured in all day looking for updates, Vitrano said. The first thing Day’s wife said to him when he got home that night wasn’t how was his day or how was that new crown he just got on his tooth, it was “Did they find Chicken Nugget?”
“It was just wild. It was amazing to see the way the community rallied around it,” Vitrano said. “For Wendy, it doesn’t matter if it’s a dog, a cat, a fish, a bird, a chicken. This was her pet and so there was this sort of commonality that echoed through the listeners of that could be any of us. That could be our pet. It just so happened this was a chicken.”
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Chicken Nugget turned up outside the Blackstone, was fed blueberries
Then that chicken that once was lost was found.
An elated Sellers called into the show on Wednesday to report she had received a text that morning with the happy news.
“They found Chicken Nugget over by the Blackstone (Family Restaurant) and she was not on the grill,” Sellers said on the air. “It’s a long story, but somebody has got her. She’s been in their house for two days and we’re going to pick her up today.”
It turns out a man who saw the chicken outside the restaurant on Walnut Street didn’t know quite what to do with her so he brought her home.
“For the last two days, they kept the chicken in their kitchen and they fed it blueberries and spinach leaves,” Sellers said. “Here this whole time that we’ve been going out every night and calling her and walking up and down alleys and asking people, she couldn’t hear me because she was in somebody’s house and she was being taken care of.”
It was a member of that rescue couple’s family who helped connect the dots through KISS-FM, a secondary connection through Elmore Elementary School, social media contacts and a dollop of everybody-knows-everybody-in-Green Bay that eventually led Sellers to learn Chicken Nugget was safe and sound.
“As soon as she called me, I said, ‘Sweetheart, what is your address? I can be there right now,’” said Sellers, who picked the chicken up Wednesday morning.
The couple who had been caring for asked for privacy, but Sellers insisted on giving them some money as a thank you for looking out for her girl.
Why did Chicken Nugget cross the road? Nobody will ever know. Perhaps the bigger question is how did she ever manage to cross the road safely? She traveled roughly a quarter-mile away from home after flying the coop on her little free-range adventure.
She cooed when Sellers showed up to chauffeur her back to her roost, where nobody was happier to see her than her three sisters, Edna, Big C and Goldie.
“All of them went crazy when I got her home and I put her back in there. They had to have been missing her,” Sellers said.
She got all four of them as babies at Fleet Farm in April and kept them in the house until they were big enough to go outside in their coop. They lay eggs of various sizes and colors, but for Sellers, the real joy is watching them, spoiling them and having them follow her around.
“Life is hard, right? And you’ve got to find some happiness,” she said. “Every time I open this box on the deck and there’s some eggs in there, it’s just like I’m a giddy kid.”
In a Facebook post Wednesday afternoon, Sellers thanked everyone who helped. "I can’t say enough how grateful I am and how wonderful it is to know that our community is just amazing," she wrote.
As for Day, Schurk and Vitrano, the homecoming was that rare chance to play “Chicken Nugget Dreamland” by Parry Gripp to celebrate a happy ending and the power of radio.
“Just kind of a cool little story,” Day said. “This couldn’t happen with Apple Music or this couldn’t happen with Spotify. This couldn't happen with Amazon Music. This is kind of what makes local radio different, that connection with the community and the fact that the community all got together and searched for this chicken — and found the chicken.”
Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or kmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com . Follow her on X @KendraMeinert .
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: When Chicken Nugget flew the coop on Green Bay's west side, 95.9 KISS-FM listeners and community rallied to get her back home
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