Shari Bibich was driving along State Highway 20 on her way to Oak Harbor last week when she noticed a brood of chickens on the side of the road and hoped they wouldn’t cross the street.

When she returned to Coupeville, it was obvious they tried and one didn’t make it.

“It broke my heart,” Bibich said.

Bibich, shelter manager at Whidbey Animals’ Improvement Foundation in Coupeville, told the story to two Oak Harbor volunteers who were at the shelter and they put a plan into action to save the remaining birds from a similar fate.

Pat Lamont and Pam Fick first rounded up their husbands, then rounded up the abandoned chickens.

The rescue took place over two consecutive days and included Curt Fick scaling a tree in complete darkness, then snatching the chickens with a fishing net 15 feet off the ground.

Pat Lamont and Pam Fick had succeeded just before dark the previous afternoon in netting one chicken on the ground only to watch the rest scatter near the highway.

“After that, they became very skittish,” Pat Lamont said.

A longtime chicken raiser, she then hatched a better plan.

“Since I had chickens, I knew at night that chickens roost and when they go to sleep you can pick them up and they don’t move,” Lamont said.

The group spotted the madrona tree in which the chickens were roosting on the west side of Highway 20.

Armed with a net and flashlight, Curt Fick volunteered to climb the tree while his wife and Pat and T.J. Lamont watched from below.

Fick’s first swipe at a chicken was unsuccessful.

Sort of.

“It fell like a sack of potatoes to the ground,” Pat Lamont said.

“We thought we killed it, but we hadn’t.”

It remained sound asleep, she said, until it was placed in a dog kennel in the back of a truck.

The capture of the remaining three went more smoothly, increasing the Lamonts’ brood to 14 chickens in their pen.

Bibich was glad to see a happy ending for the four chickens, who were the talk of the town in Coupeville in recent weeks because of their high visibility alongside the highway since just before Thanksgiving.

Many passers-by repeatedly called the Muellers on Madrona Way, believing the chickens belonged to them because they roamed near the back edge of their property.

But the suspicions are that these chickens were dumped along the highway.

Lamont said she believes three of the four are roosters. She plans to keep them all.

“They’re nice, fat, healthy chickens,” she said. “They were eating well out there.”