When Dylan Breese arrived at the scene of the accident, he wasn’t met with shouting, crying, or police sirens—just a tiny chirp coming from underground.
It’s not an unfamiliar sound to Breese, who started rescuing wayward street chickens in Tampa’s Ybor City eight years ago and launched his nonprofit, the Ybor Misfits Microsanctuary, in 2020. This wasn’t even the first time he’d rescued a bird who’d fallen into the subterranean world of storm drains and tunnels. “Usually, we can play a YouTube video of a family of chicks chirping and the mom making noises, and a lot of times, that will draw them out of the tunnel,” he says. “But this one was stubborn.”
And so, last week, Breese got to use his chicken vacuum for the first time. Picture a Shop-Vac—and that’s basically it. The key difference between a Shop-Vac and a chicken vacuum is a PVC attachment with a small hole at the end—just big enough to suction a chick but not so big the chick would go flying into the body of the vacuum. “It just kind of holds them at the end of it,” Breese says.
Breese designed this chick magnet after once having to use a regular vacuum in an emergency situation. “A year ago we had to pull a baby from a pipe,” he says. “We got one of the local shops to give us a vacuum, and it was one of those you just put on a bucket. We knew, worst case, he would just end up in there.” Even though Breese knew the chick would live through such an ordeal, “we were scared to death,” he says. “It was a desperation move.”
Somehow, to everyone’s relief, the chick attached to the end of the vacuum hose and stayed there. A few months later, after Breese saw a post about a Key West chicken rescue using a retrofitted vacuum, he decided to make his own.
And when this tiny “baby baby” of a chick—likely just a few days old—finally made its way into an accessible part of the open drain hours after Breese first arrived, he knew it was “go” time. So, like a Ghostbuster looking for a tiny, fluffy apparition, Breese dropped the hose into the grate. “I think it being dark helped because he didn’t see it coming at him,” he says. “I was able to put it right above him, and he couldn’t even tell. When I flipped the switch, he was already a part of the vacuum.”
The safe but surly beneficiary of the chicken vacuum.
Since his close encounter with the humankind, the chick has joined a group of other babies Breese recently rescued, who were stunned by a cold snap, and will grow up with this band of merry, fluffy misfits until he’s ready to be adopted. “If we raise them, we know they’re not going to have the street skills to go back out into the street and thrive. So we find them homes,” Breese explains.
The vacuumed chick now resides with other chicks Breese rescued during a cold snap and awaits adoption.
As a rule, the chickens of Ybor City, some of which were brought up from Key West during the neighborhood’s cigar boom in the late 1800s, are fairly streetwise. “They will look both ways sometimes before they cross the road, and if they see a car coming, they’ll wait,” Breese says. “Whenever there’s danger, they let each other know. They have it figured out.” But it’s the newcomers—like this chick, or more frequently, abandoned birds—that end up in bad situations.
Breese has helped hundreds of chickens like these over the years, and with a chick vacuum added to his arsenal of poultry-saving products, he’ll be able to save even more. “I would imagine that come spring, I’ll probably have to bust it out quite a bit more often,” he says.
Learn more about Ybor Misfits and how you can help their mission here.
