You read it first in Key West The Newspaper: Assistant City Manager John Jones has confirmed that the City is considering the possibility of landscaping Mt. Trashmore and turning it into the nation's first Rooster Park.
Currently, the proliferation of wild poultry is a thorn in the side of Animal Control and Key West Code Enforcement. What to do about feral chickens that belong to no one?
Mount Trashmore is the former city dump, closed in 1994. Except for a thin layer of grass, it is a barren ziggurat, a monument to obsolescence, an eyesore to travelers on North Roosevelt Boulevard. A film of plastic and two feet of topsoil enclose this "poison pill" of Key West non-collectables, plastics and diapers, yard waste and old bits of iron. Special personnel monitor the 200 foot mound for methane gas emissions and for toxic leachate.
Chickens—like most of us—require water and cover to survive in the Florida heat. If provided with abundant brush, water and food, they will stay put. They don't care if their territory is a former dump, so long as food is forthcoming and they can escape the scathing sun. Creatures of habit, they can be enticed to lay their eggs where they can be collected regularly. So much easier than the birth control measures faced by man and cat!
Jones says he has talked with Gus Rios of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and has been told that the hill may be landscaped with bushes and other plantings. (Trees, because of their ability to penetrate the plastic layer, are going to take more research.) He has also given the go-ahead to build fences, sheds or coops.
The concept: give Key Westers a place to drop off unwanted poultry, where they can continue to roam free but where their numbers will be limited by collecting their eggs, and by the natural predations of hawks and raccoons.
Imagine! A future "Non-Indigenous Park" landscaped with bushes (perhaps also trees) donated by the residents of Key West, filled with flashy jungle fowl. Signs that say, "Please Feed the Animals." Roosters crowing their lungs out, and offending no one. Colorful cocks sparring over the prettiest hens. Little peepers scurrying through the underbrush. All this, and a view of Key West to die for!
If the environmental agencies give their approval to plant trees, people could deliver to Mt. Trashmore their unwanted volunteer poincianas, jacarandas and the ficuses which are out-growing their pot on the patio.
Few homeowners have the luxury of a yard big enough to accommodate the many wonderful (and non-indigenous) trees which do so well in this narrow tropical belt of the USA: the Spanish limes, the sausage trees, the banyans, ceibas, kapoks, rubber trees, mahoganies. If the landfill is opened to these trees, they could spread their generous branches over what was once an eyesore, lunching lustily on garbage past.
In 10 years, Mt. Trashmore could be covered with flowers, fruit and lianas. It could be our very own "lost Mayan temple" in the North Stock Island "jungle." A worthy showcase for the most beautiful and freedom-loving chickens in the world. Maybe even a new habitat for endangered tree snails and butterflies.
Jones told KWTN Tuesday he is going out of town, but when he returns he is eager to pick up this project where he left off. "I am sold on your concept," he told us. "We need to explore it a bit more."
Now it remains to be seen what the local, state and federal environmental powers-that-be will permit us to achieve there.