HUNTINGTON BEACH : Pupils Not Chicken About Mummification

King Kluck was finally laid to rest Friday in the Valley of the Klucks, next to Ethel Dwyer Middle School. It was a burial ceremony that even King Tut would have envied.

Actually, seven King Klucks wrapped in linen and covered in faux rings, beads and potpourri were buried in a somber afternoon ceremony marking the end of a project on mummification.

“May their feathers never be plucked, may their pecking order always remain the same, and may they never meet Col. Sanders in the afterlife,” said teacher Neal Kirby, during the eulogy.

Dwyer’s sixth-grade students have been studying the mummification process as part of their course work on ancient Egypt.

Sixth-grade teacher Barbara Gehlke said the project was designed to help students have a better understanding of the Egyptian culture.

Students mixed borax, baking soda and washing soda to make natron, which will preserve the chickens, Lempert said. Then chickens were placed in plastic containers and put in a vault in the school’s boiler room for 30 days. The students visited the chickens once a week to observe the embalming process--a not so pleasant experience, they said.

“It smelled,” said Barrett Huntsman, 12. “When we went down there we had to plug our nose.”