Hollywood Freeway Chickens

The Hollywood Freeway chickens are a colony of feral chickens that live under the Vineland Avenue off-ramp of the Hollywood Freeway (U.S. Route 101) in Los Angeles, California. It is not definitively known how they came to be there, although news stories generally ascribe them to an overturned poultry truck.

Chickens underneath the Vineland off-ramp became local celebrities upon their arrival sometime around 1970. By 1976, the flock included about 50 of the chickens, described as Rhode Island Reds. They became known as "Minnie's chickens", named after Minnie Blumfield, an elderly retiree who fed them regularly. When she became too frail to feed them, a young actress, Jodie Mann, with Actors and Others for Animals made arrangements to relocate the chickens. Nearly a hundred of the hens and roosters were relocated to a ranch in Simi Valley, California. But not every member of the flock was apprehended, and those that remained spawned a new population. Subsequent removal efforts in the following years all had a similar outcome.

The first colony at the Vineland ramp has spread and there is now a second colony at the Burbank ramp, two miles away.